I am novice to C programming. Is it possible to match pattern inside the C string, like any built in functions?
I am using Red Hat Linux and I want to check if a string starts with abc: or def: followed by 10 digit numbers @ chars. Something like : (abc|def):([0-9]{10})@([A-Za-z0-9]*).
Is there any C built in function which I can use to check this pattern matching.
Thanks for your help.
You can use POSIX regex matching in linux. See man 3 regex for more details. If you are looking for a fast, safe and threaded library you can use re2 library from Google with support like pre-compiled regex. (https://github.com/google/re2)
Linux and POSIX have regex(3) functions. You'll need to "compile" -that is prepare by transforming- your regular expression string using regcomp first.
In some simple cases, you might also use other string functions, like strstr, strchr, sscanf(3) (the %n format specifier might be handy, to know how much bytes you have scanned).
You could also consider some lexing utility, perhaps using flex to generate a tokenizer able to recognize your regexp.
