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+
+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. +
++The program 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 +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 ++Once you have compiled 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 the +PCRE library. The pcredemo program is provided as a simple coding +example. + +
+On some operating systems (e.g. Solaris), when PCRE is not installed in the +standard library directory, you may get an error like this when you try to run +pcredemo: +
+ 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: 23 January 2008
+
+Copyright © 1997-2008 University of Cambridge.
+
+
+Return to the PCRE index page. +