Checking strings with regex in C++

Question

I am going to use regular expressions in a C++ application, but I am not experienced in regex. I want in particular to check a number of strings if they belong to one of the following categories:

X.anystring -> X must be necessarily and exclusively letter (not digit).

XY.anystring -> X, Y must be necessarily and exclusively digits 0-9 (not letters).

How can I check them using regex? What tutorial for regex could you recommend in order to acquaint me with regex?

Answer 1

Seriously, regexp:s are not the right solution for you in this case.

To start with, regexp:s are not part of the C++ language so you will need to use a specific regexp library. (C++11, whoever, include support for regexp:s.)

Secondly, both your use cases can trivially be encoded in plain C++, all you need to do is to loop over the characters in the strings and check if each of them match your requirements.