Return to the PCRE index page.
This page is part of the PCRE HTML documentation. It was generated automatically from the original man page. If there is any nonsense in it, please consult the man page, in case the conversion went wrong. PCRE SAMPLE PROGRAM
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
gcc -o pcredemo -I/usr/local/include pcredemo.c -L/usr/local/lib -lpcre
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'
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
-R/usr/local/lib
Philip Hazel University Computing Service Cambridge CB2 3QH, England.
Last updated: 10 January 2012 Copyright © 1997-2012 University of Cambridge.