PCRE(3)

NAME
PCRE - Perl-compatible regular expressions

SYNOPSIS

#include <pcre.h>

int pcre_exec(const pcre *code, const pcre_extra *extra,
const char *subject, int length, int startoffset,
int options, int *ovector, int ovecsize);

DESCRIPTION

This function matches a compiled regular expression against a given subject string, and returns offsets to capturing subexpressions. Its arguments are:

  code Points to the compiled pattern
  extra Points to an associated pcre_extra structure,
                 or is NULL
  subject Points to the subject string
  length Length of the subject string, in bytes
  startoffset Offset in bytes in the subject at which to
                 start matching
  options Option bits
  ovector Points to a vector of ints for result offsets
  ovecsize Size of the vector (a multiple of 3)

The options are:

  PCRE_ANCHORED Match only at the first position
  PCRE_NOTBOL Subject is not the beginning of a line
  PCRE_NOTEOL Subject is not the end of a line
  PCRE_NOTEMPTY An empty string is not a valid match
  PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK Do not check the subject for UTF-8
                       validity (only relevant if PCRE_UTF8
                       was set at compile time)

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