PCRE(3)

NAME
PCRE - Perl-compatible regular expressions

SYNOPSIS

#include <pcre.h>

pcre *pcre_compile(const char *pattern, int options,
const char **errptr, int *erroffset,
const unsigned char *tableptr);

DESCRIPTION

This function compiles a regular expression into an internal form. Its arguments are:

  pattern A zero-terminated string containing the
                  regular expression to be compiled
  options Zero or more option bits
  errptr Where to put an error message
  erroffset Offset in pattern where error was found
  tableptr Pointer to character tables, or NULL to
                  use the built-in default

The option bits are:

  PCRE_ANCHORED Force pattern anchoring
  PCRE_CASELESS Do caseless matching
  PCRE_DOLLAR_ENDONLY $ not to match newline at end
  PCRE_DOTALL . matches anything including NL
  PCRE_EXTENDED Ignore whitespace and # comments
  PCRE_EXTRA PCRE extra features
                        (not much use currently)
  PCRE_MULTILINE ^ and $ match newlines within data
  PCRE_NO_AUTO_CAPTURE Disable numbered capturing paren-
                        theses (named ones available)
  PCRE_UNGREEDY Invert greediness of quantifiers
  PCRE_UTF8 Run in UTF-8 mode
  PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK Do not check the pattern for UTF-8
                        validity (only relevant if
                        PCRE_UTF8 is set)

PCRE must be compiled with UTF-8 support in order to use PCRE_UTF8 (or PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK).

The yield of the function is a pointer to a private data structure that contains the compiled pattern, or NULL if an error was detected.

There is a complete description of the PCRE API in the pcreapi page.