Matching the GNU way means trying to match as much of a string as possible starting at a position within it you specify. Once you've compiled a pattern into a pattern buffer (see section GNU Regular Expression Compiling), you can ask the matcher to match that pattern against a string using:
int
re_match (struct re_pattern_buffer *pattern_buffer,
const char *string, const int size,
const int start, struct re_registers *regs)
pattern_buffer is the address of a pattern buffer containing a compiled pattern. string is the string you want to match; it can contain newline and null characters. size is the length of that string. start is the string index at which you want to begin matching; the first character of string is at index zero. See section Using Registers, for a explanation of regs; you can safely pass zero.
re_match matches the regular expression in pattern_buffer
against the string string according to the syntax in
pattern_buffers's syntax field. (See section GNU Regular Expression Compiling, for how to set it.) The function returns
@math{-1} if the compiled pattern does not match any part of
string and @math{-2} if an internal error happens; otherwise, it
returns how many (possibly zero) characters of string the pattern
matched.
An example: suppose pattern_buffer points to a pattern buffer
containing the compiled pattern for `a*', and string points
to `aaaaab' (whereupon size should be 6). Then if start
is 2, re_match returns 3, i.e., `a*' would have matched the
last three `a's in string. If start is 0,
re_match returns 5, i.e., `a*' would have matched all the
`a's in string. If start is either 5 or 6, it returns
zero.
If start is not between zero and size, then
re_match returns @math{-1}.
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