PCRECPP(3)                OpenBSD Programmer's Manual               PCRECPP(3)



NAME
       PCRE - Perl-compatible regular expressions.

SYNOPSIS OF C++ WRAPPER

       #include <pcrecpp.h>

DESCRIPTION

       The C++ wrapper for PCRE was provided by Google Inc. Some additional
       functionality was added by Giuseppe Maxia. This brief man page was
       constructed from the notes in the pcrecpp.h file, which should be
       consulted for further details. Note that the C++ wrapper supports only
       the original 8-bit PCRE library. There is no 16-bit support at present.

MATCHING INTERFACE

       The "FullMatch" operation checks that supplied text matches a supplied
       pattern exactly. If pointer arguments are supplied, it copies matched
       sub-strings that match sub-patterns into them.

         Example: successful match
            pcrecpp::RE re("h.*o");
            re.FullMatch("hello");

         Example: unsuccessful match (requires full match):
            pcrecpp::RE re("e");
            !re.FullMatch("hello");

         Example: creating a temporary RE object:
            pcrecpp::RE("h.*o").FullMatch("hello");

       You can pass in a "const char*" or a "string" for "text". The examples
       below tend to use a const char*. You can, as in the different examples
       above, store the RE object explicitly in a variable or use a temporary
       RE object. The examples below use one mode or the other arbitrarily.
       Either could correctly be used for any of these examples.

       You must supply extra pointer arguments to extract matched subpieces.

         Example: extracts "ruby" into "s" and 1234 into "i"
            int i;
            string s;
            pcrecpp::RE re("(\\w+):(\\d+)");
            re.FullMatch("ruby:1234", &s, &i);

         Example: does not try to extract any extra sub-patterns
            re.FullMatch("ruby:1234", &s);

         Example: does not try to extract into NULL
            re.FullMatch("ruby:1234", NULL, &i);

         Example: integer overflow causes failure
            !re.FullMatch("ruby:1234567891234", NULL, &i);

         Example: fails because there aren't enough sub-patterns:
            !pcrecpp::RE("\\w+:\\d+").FullMatch("ruby:1234", &s);

         Example: fails because string cannot be stored in integer
            !pcrecpp::RE("(.*)").FullMatch("ruby", &i);

       The provided pointer arguments can be pointers to any scalar numeric
       type, or one of:

          string        (matched piece is copied to string)
          StringPiece   (StringPiece is mutated to point to matched piece)
          T             (where "bool T::ParseFrom(const char*, int)" exists)
          NULL          (the corresponding matched sub-pattern is not copied)

       The function returns true iff all of the following conditions are
       satisfied:

         a. "text" matches "pattern" exactly;

         b. The number of matched sub-patterns is >= number of supplied
            pointers;

         c. The "i"th argument has a suitable type for holding the
            string captured as the "i"th sub-pattern. If you pass in
            void * NULL for the "i"th argument, or a non-void * NULL
            of the correct type, or pass fewer arguments than the
            number of sub-patterns, "i"th captured sub-pattern is
            ignored.

       CAVEAT: An optional sub-pattern that does not exist in the matched
       string is assigned the empty string. Therefore, the following will
       return false (because the empty string is not a valid number):

          int number;
          pcrecpp::RE::FullMatch("abc", "[a-z]+(\\d+)?", &number);

       The matching interface supports at most 16 arguments per call.  If you
       need more, consider using the more general interface
       pcrecpp::RE::DoMatch. See pcrecpp.h for the signature for DoMatch.

       NOTE: Do not use no_arg, which is used internally to mark the end of a
       list of optional arguments, as a placeholder for missing arguments, as
       this can lead to segfaults.

QUOTING METACHARACTERS

       You can use the "QuoteMeta" operation to insert backslashes before all
       potentially meaningful characters in a string. The returned string,
       used as a regular expression, will exactly match the original string.

         Example:
            string quoted = RE::QuoteMeta(unquoted);

       Note that it's legal to escape a character even if it has no special
       meaning in a regular expression -- so this function does that. (This
       also makes it identical to the perl function of the same name; see
       "perldoc -f quotemeta".)  For example, "1.5-2.0?" becomes
       "1\.5\-2\.0\?".

PARTIAL MATCHES

       You can use the "PartialMatch" operation when you want the pattern to
       match any substring of the text.

         Example: simple search for a string:
            pcrecpp::RE("ell").PartialMatch("hello");

         Example: find first number in a string:
            int number;
            pcrecpp::RE re("(\\d+)");
            re.PartialMatch("x*100 + 20", &number);
            assert(number == 100);

UTF-8 AND THE MATCHING INTERFACE

       By default, pattern and text are plain text, one byte per character.
       The UTF8 flag, passed to the constructor, causes both pattern and
       string to be treated as UTF-8 text, still a byte stream but potentially
       multiple bytes per character. In practice, the text is likelier to be
       UTF-8 than the pattern, but the match returned may depend on the UTF8
       flag, so always use it when matching UTF8 text. For example, "." will
       match one byte normally but with UTF8 set may match up to three bytes
       of a multi-byte character.

         Example:
            pcrecpp::RE_Options options;
            options.set_utf8();
            pcrecpp::RE re(utf8_pattern, options);
            re.FullMatch(utf8_string);

         Example: using the convenience function UTF8():
            pcrecpp::RE re(utf8_pattern, pcrecpp::UTF8());
            re.FullMatch(utf8_string);

       NOTE: The UTF8 flag is ignored if pcre was not configured with the
             --enable-utf8 flag.

PASSING MODIFIERS TO THE REGULAR EXPRESSION ENGINE

       PCRE defines some modifiers to change the behavior of the regular
       expression engine. The C++ wrapper defines an auxiliary class,
       RE_Options, as a vehicle to pass such modifiers to a RE class.
       Currently, the following modifiers are supported:

          modifier              description               Perl corresponding

          PCRE_CASELESS         case insensitive match      /i
          PCRE_MULTILINE        multiple lines match        /m
          PCRE_DOTALL           dot matches newlines        /s
          PCRE_DOLLAR_ENDONLY   $ matches only at end       N/A
          PCRE_EXTRA            strict escape parsing       N/A
          PCRE_EXTENDED         ignore whitespaces          /x
          PCRE_UTF8             handles UTF8 chars          built-in
          PCRE_UNGREEDY         reverses * and *?           N/A
          PCRE_NO_AUTO_CAPTURE  disables capturing parens   N/A (*)

       (*) Both Perl and PCRE allow non capturing parentheses by means of the
       "?:" modifier within the pattern itself. e.g. (?:ab|cd) does not
       capture, while (ab|cd) does.

       For a full account on how each modifier works, please check the PCRE
       API reference page.

       For each modifier, there are two member functions whose name is made
       out of the modifier in lowercase, without the "PCRE_" prefix. For
       instance, PCRE_CASELESS is handled by

         bool caseless()

       which returns true if the modifier is set, and

         RE_Options & set_caseless(bool)

       which sets or unsets the modifier. Moreover, PCRE_EXTRA_MATCH_LIMIT can
       be accessed through the set_match_limit() and match_limit() member
       functions. Setting match_limit to a non-zero value will limit the
       execution of pcre to keep it from doing bad things like blowing the
       stack or taking an eternity to return a result. A value of 5000 is good
       enough to stop stack blowup in a 2MB thread stack. Setting match_limit
       to zero disables match limiting. Alternatively, you can call
       match_limit_recursion() which uses PCRE_EXTRA_MATCH_LIMIT_RECURSION to
       limit how much PCRE recurses. match_limit() limits the number of
       matches PCRE does; match_limit_recursion() limits the depth of internal
       recursion, and therefore the amount of stack that is used.

       Normally, to pass one or more modifiers to a RE class, you declare a
       RE_Options object, set the appropriate options, and pass this object to
       a RE constructor. Example:

          RE_Options opt;
          opt.set_caseless(true);
          if (RE("HELLO", opt).PartialMatch("hello world")) ...

       RE_options has two constructors. The default constructor takes no
       arguments and creates a set of flags that are off by default. The
       optional parameter option_flags is to facilitate transfer of legacy
       code from C programs.  This lets you do

          RE(pattern,
            RE_Options(PCRE_CASELESS|PCRE_MULTILINE)).PartialMatch(str);

       However, new code is better off doing

          RE(pattern,
            RE_Options().set_caseless(true).set_multiline(true))
              .PartialMatch(str);

       If you are going to pass one of the most used modifiers, there are some
       convenience functions that return a RE_Options class with the
       appropriate modifier already set: CASELESS(), UTF8(), MULTILINE(),
       DOTALL(), and EXTENDED().

       If you need to set several options at once, and you don't want to go
       through the pains of declaring a RE_Options object and setting several
       options, there is a parallel method that give you such ability on the
       fly. You can concatenate several set_xxxxx() member functions, since
       each of them returns a reference to its class object. For example, to
       pass PCRE_CASELESS, PCRE_EXTENDED, and PCRE_MULTILINE to a RE with one
       statement, you may write:

          RE(" ^ xyz \\s+ .* blah$",
            RE_Options()
              .set_caseless(true)
              .set_extended(true)
              .set_multiline(true)).PartialMatch(sometext);


SCANNING TEXT INCREMENTALLY

       The "Consume" operation may be useful if you want to repeatedly match
       regular expressions at the front of a string and skip over them as they
       match. This requires use of the "StringPiece" type, which represents a
       sub-range of a real string. Like RE, StringPiece is defined in the
       pcrecpp namespace.

         Example: read lines of the form "var = value" from a string.
            string contents = ...;                 // Fill string somehow
            pcrecpp::StringPiece input(contents);  // Wrap in a StringPiece

            string var;
            int value;
            pcrecpp::RE re("(\\w+) = (\\d+)\n");
            while (re.Consume(&input, &var, &value)) {
              ...;
            }

       Each successful call to "Consume" will set "var/value", and also
       advance "input" so it points past the matched text.

       The "FindAndConsume" operation is similar to "Consume" but does not
       anchor your match at the beginning of the string. For example, you
       could extract all words from a string by repeatedly calling

         pcrecpp::RE("(\\w+)").FindAndConsume(&input, &word)

PARSING HEX/OCTAL/C-RADIX NUMBERS

       By default, if you pass a pointer to a numeric value, the corresponding
       text is interpreted as a base-10 number. You can instead wrap the
       pointer with a call to one of the operators Hex(), Octal(), or CRadix()
       to interpret the text in another base. The CRadix operator interprets
       C-style "0" (base-8) and "0x" (base-16) prefixes, but defaults to
       base-10.

         Example:
           int a, b, c, d;
           pcrecpp::RE re("(.*) (.*) (.*) (.*)");
           re.FullMatch("100 40 0100 0x40",
                        pcrecpp::Octal(&a), pcrecpp::Hex(&b),
                        pcrecpp::CRadix(&c), pcrecpp::CRadix(&d));

       will leave 64 in a, b, c, and d.

REPLACING PARTS OF STRINGS

       You can replace the first match of "pattern" in "str" with "rewrite".
       Within "rewrite", backslash-escaped digits (\1 to \9) can be used to
       insert text matching corresponding parenthesized group from the
       pattern. \0 in "rewrite" refers to the entire matching text. For
       example:

         string s = "yabba dabba doo";
         pcrecpp::RE("b+").Replace("d", &s);

       will leave "s" containing "yada dabba doo". The result is true if the
       pattern matches and a replacement occurs, false otherwise.

       GlobalReplace is like Replace except that it replaces all occurrences
       of the pattern in the string with the rewrite. Replacements are not
       subject to re-matching. For example:

         string s = "yabba dabba doo";
         pcrecpp::RE("b+").GlobalReplace("d", &s);

       will leave "s" containing "yada dada doo". It returns the number of
       replacements made.

       Extract is like Replace, except that if the pattern matches, "rewrite"
       is copied into "out" (an additional argument) with substitutions.  The
       non-matching portions of "text" are ignored. Returns true iff a match
       occurred and the extraction happened successfully;  if no match occurs,
       the string is left unaffected.

AUTHOR

       The C++ wrapper was contributed by Google Inc.
       Copyright (c) 2007 Google Inc.

REVISION

       Last updated: 08 January 2012



                                                                    PCRECPP(3)
