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NAME | PCRE SAMPLE PROGRAM | AUTHOR | REVISION | COLOPHON |
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PCRESAMPLE(3) Library Functions Manual PCRESAMPLE(3)
PCRE - Perl-compatible regular expressions
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.
Philip Hazel
University Computing Service
Cambridge CB2 3QH, England.
Last updated: 10 January 2012
Copyright (c) 1997-2012 University of Cambridge.
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)
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