Boost.Regex

Contacts and Acknowledgements

The author can be contacted at john_maddock@compuserve.com, the home page for this library is at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/john_maddock/regexpp.htm, and the official boost version can be obtained from www.boost.org/libraries.htm.

I am indebted to Robert Sedgewick's "Algorithms in C++" for forcing me to think about algorithms and their performance, and to the folks at boost for forcing me to think, period. The following people have all contributed useful comments or fixes: Dave Abrahams, Mike Allison, Edan Ayal, Jayashree Balasubramanian, Jan Bölsche, Beman Dawes, Paul Baxter, David Bergman, David Dennerline, Edward Diener, Peter Dimov, Robert Dunn, Fabio Forno, Tobias Gabrielsson, Rob Gillen, Marc Gregoire, Chris Hecker, Nick Hodapp, Jesse Jones, Martin Jost, Boris Krasnovskiy, Jan Hermelink, Max Leung, Wei-hao Lin, Jens Maurer, Richard Peters, Heiko Schmidt, Jason Shirk, Gerald Slacik, Scobie Smith, Mike Smyth, Alexander Sokolovsky, Hervé Poirier, Michael Raykh, Marc Recht, Scott VanCamp, Bruno Voigt, Alexey Voinov, Jerry Waldorf, Rob Ward, Lealon Watts, Thomas Witt and Yuval Yosef. I am also grateful to the manuals supplied with the Henry Spencer, Perl and GNU regular expression libraries - wherever possible I have tried to maintain compatibility with these libraries and with the POSIX standard - the code however is entirely my own, including any bugs! I can absolutely guarantee that I will not fix any bugs I don't know about, so if you have any comments or spot any bugs, please get in touch.

Useful further information can be found at:

A short tutorial on regular expressions can be found here.

The Open Unix Specification contains a wealth of useful material, including the regular expression syntax, and specifications for <regex.h> and <nl_types.h>.

The Pattern Matching Pointers site is a "must visit" resource for anyone interested in pattern matching.

Glimpse and Agrep, use a simplified regular expression syntax to achieve faster search times.

Udi Manber and Ricardo Baeza-Yates both have a selection of useful pattern matching papers available from their respective web sites.

Revised 17 May 2003

Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. Dr John Maddock makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.