pcresample(3) — Linux manual page

NAME | PCRE SAMPLE PROGRAM | AUTHOR | REVISION | COLOPHON

PCRESAMPLE(3)           Library Functions Manual           PCRESAMPLE(3)

NAME         top

       PCRE - Perl-compatible regular expressions

PCRE SAMPLE PROGRAM         top


       A simple, complete demonstration program, to get you started with
       using PCRE, is supplied in the file pcredemo.c in the PCRE
       distribution. A listing of this program is given in the pcredemo
       documentation. If you do not have a copy of the PCRE
       distribution, you can save this listing to re-create pcredemo.c.

       The demonstration program, which uses the original PCRE 8-bit
       library, compiles the regular expression that is its first
       argument, and matches it against the subject string in its second
       argument. No PCRE options are set, and default character tables
       are used. If matching succeeds, the program outputs the portion
       of the subject that matched, together with the contents of any
       captured substrings.

       If the -g option is given on the command line, the program then
       goes on to check for further matches of the same regular
       expression in the same subject string. The logic is a little bit
       tricky because of the possibility of matching an empty string.
       Comments in the code explain what is going on.

       If PCRE is installed in the standard include and library
       directories for your operating system, you should be able to
       compile the demonstration program using this command:

         gcc -o pcredemo pcredemo.c -lpcre

       If PCRE is installed elsewhere, you may need to add additional
       options to the command line. For example, on a Unix-like system
       that has PCRE installed in /usr/local, you can compile the
       demonstration program using a command like this:

         gcc -o pcredemo -I/usr/local/include pcredemo.c \
             -L/usr/local/lib -lpcre

       In a Windows environment, if you want to statically link the
       program against a non-dll pcre.a file, you must uncomment the
       line that defines PCRE_STATIC before including pcre.h, because
       otherwise the pcre_malloc() and pcre_free() exported functions
       will be declared __declspec(dllimport), with unwanted results.

       Once you have compiled and linked the demonstration program, you
       can run simple tests like this:

         ./pcredemo 'cat|dog' 'the cat sat on the mat'
         ./pcredemo -g 'cat|dog' 'the dog sat on the cat'

       Note that there is a much more comprehensive test program, called
       pcretest, which supports many more facilities for testing regular
       expressions and both PCRE libraries. The pcredemo program is
       provided as a simple coding example.

       If you try to run pcredemo when PCRE is not installed in the
       standard library directory, you may get an error like this on
       some operating systems (e.g. Solaris):

         ld.so.1: a.out: fatal: libpcre.so.0: open failed: No such file
       or directory

       This is caused by the way shared library support works on those
       systems. You need to add

         -R/usr/local/lib

       (for example) to the compile command to get round this problem.

AUTHOR         top


       Philip Hazel
       University Computing Service
       Cambridge CB2 3QH, England.

REVISION         top


       Last updated: 10 January 2012
       Copyright (c) 1997-2012 University of Cambridge.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular
       Expressions) project.  Information about the project can be found
       at ⟨http://www.pcre.org/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this
       manual page, see
       ⟨http://bugs.exim.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=PCRE⟩.  This page was
       obtained from the tarball pcre-8.45.tar.gz fetched from
       ⟨ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/⟩ on
       2021-08-27.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
       version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
       to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
       improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

PCRE 8.30                    10 January 2012               PCRESAMPLE(3)

Pages that refer to this page: pcreapi(3)