Regular expressions in C: examples?

Question

Regular expressions actually aren't part of ANSI C. It sounds like you might be talking about the POSIX regular expression library, which comes with most (all?) *nixes. Here's an example of using POSIX regexes in C (based on this):

#include <regex.h>        
regex_t regex;
int reti;
char msgbuf[100];

/* Compile regular expression */
reti = regcomp(&regex, "^a[[:alnum:]]", 0);
if (reti) {
    fprintf(stderr, "Could not compile regex\n");
    exit(1);
}

/* Execute regular expression */
reti = regexec(&regex, "abc", 0, NULL, 0);
if (!reti) {
    puts("Match");
}
else if (reti == REG_NOMATCH) {
    puts("No match");
}
else {
    regerror(reti, &regex, msgbuf, sizeof(msgbuf));
    fprintf(stderr, "Regex match failed: %s\n", msgbuf);
    exit(1);
}

/* Free memory allocated to the pattern buffer by regcomp() */
regfree(&regex);

Alternatively, you may want to check out PCRE, a library for Perl-compatible regular expressions in C. The Perl syntax is pretty much that same syntax used in Java, Python, and a number of other languages. The POSIX syntax is the syntax used by grep, sed, vi, etc.

It's probably not what you want, but a tool like re2c can compile POSIX(-ish) regular expressions to ANSI C. It's written as a replacement for lex, but this approach allows you to sacrifice flexibility and legibility for the last bit of speed, if you really need it.

man regex.h reports there is no manual entry for regex.h, but man 3 regex gives you a page explaining the POSIX functions for pattern matching.
The same functions are described in The GNU C Library: Regular Expression Matching, which explains that the GNU C Library supports both the POSIX.2 interface and the interface the GNU C Library has had for many years.

For example, for an hypothetical program that prints which of the strings passed as argument match the pattern passed as first argument, you could use code similar to the following one.

#include <errno.h>
#include <regex.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

void print_regerror (int errcode, size_t length, regex_t *compiled);

int
main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
  regex_t regex;
  int result;

  if (argc < 3)
    {
      // The number of passed arguments is lower than the number of
      // expected arguments.
      fputs ("Missing command line arguments\n", stderr);
      return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

  result = regcomp (&regex, argv[1], REG_EXTENDED);
  if (result)
    {
      // Any value different from 0 means it was not possible to 
      // compile the regular expression, either for memory problems
      // or problems with the regular expression syntax.
      if (result == REG_ESPACE)
        fprintf (stderr, "%s\n", strerror(ENOMEM));
      else
        fputs ("Syntax error in the regular expression passed as first argument\n", stderr);
      return EXIT_FAILURE;               
    }
  for (int i = 2; i < argc; i++)
    {
      result = regexec (&regex, argv[i], 0, NULL, 0);
      if (!result)
        {
          printf ("'%s' matches the regular expression\n", argv[i]);
        }
      else if (result == REG_NOMATCH)
        {
          printf ("'%s' doesn't the regular expression\n", argv[i]);
        }
      else
        {
          // The function returned an error; print the string 
          // describing it.
          // Get the size of the buffer required for the error message.
          size_t length = regerror (result, &regex, NULL, 0);
          print_regerror (result, length, &regex);       
          return EXIT_FAILURE;
        }
    }

  /* Free the memory allocated from regcomp(). */
  regfree (&regex);
  return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

void
print_regerror (int errcode, size_t length, regex_t *compiled)
{
  char buffer[length];
  (void) regerror (errcode, compiled, buffer, length);
  fprintf(stderr, "Regex match failed: %s\n", buffer);
}

The last argument of regcomp() needs to be at least REG_EXTENDED, or the functions will use basic regular expressions, which means that (for example) you would need to use a\{3\} instead of a{3} used from extended regular expressions, which is probably what you expect to use.

POSIX.2 has also another function for wildcard matching: fnmatch(). It doesn't allow to compile the regular expression, or get the substrings matching a sub-expression, but it is very specific for checking when a filename match a wildcard (e.g. it uses the FNM_PATHNAME flag).

This is an example of using REG_EXTENDED. This regular expression

"^(-)?([0-9]+)((,|.)([0-9]+))?\n$"

Allows you to catch decimal numbers in Spanish system and international. :)

#include <regex.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
regex_t regex;
int reti;
char msgbuf[100];

int main(int argc, char const *argv[])
{
    while(1){
        fgets( msgbuf, 100, stdin );
        reti = regcomp(&regex, "^(-)?([0-9]+)((,|.)([0-9]+))?\n$", REG_EXTENDED);
        if (reti) {
            fprintf(stderr, "Could not compile regex\n");
            exit(1);
        }

        /* Execute regular expression */
        printf("%s\n", msgbuf);
        reti = regexec(&regex, msgbuf, 0, NULL, 0);
        if (!reti) {
            puts("Match");
        }
        else if (reti == REG_NOMATCH) {
            puts("No match");
        }
        else {
            regerror(reti, &regex, msgbuf, sizeof(msgbuf));
            fprintf(stderr, "Regex match failed: %s\n", msgbuf);
            exit(1);
        }

        /* Free memory allocated to the pattern buffer by regcomp() */
        regfree(&regex);
    }

}