NETTING C++: Introducing Regular Expressions

摘要

One of the most significant benefits of moving from ISO-C++ to C++/CLI is the enormous Microsoft~® .NET Framework Class Library (FCL) that immediately becomes available. Most readers are aware of the more glamorous domains supported by the FCL, such as Web services, networking, threads, ASP.NET, and so on. In this column, I introduce the support for regular expressions in the .NET Framework. Because ISO-C++ is without standard support for regular expressions, my TQL application (introduced in previous Netting C++ columns) uses the standard string class for all pattern matching. This occurs, for example, with the need to normalize word occurrences within a text, such as recognizing "tried", "tries", and "trying" as instances of "try". With the move to C++/CLI, I'd like to replace the string handling with the more concise and powerful .NET regular expression support. That's what I hope to accomplish in the next column, after making my way through a brief regular expression tutorial here.