Thread: a grep c alternative?

Hello folks,

I need to use some regular expression searching of the dictionary. I can do a system call to grep, but I'm looking for portability with this program, and since grep is part of linux, I can't very well port my executable to the windows environment and expect it to run.

The basic idea is:
grep "h.*i.*" dictionary

returning every word that has h followed by whatever and i followed by whatever.

Is there any built in C function or open-source C program that we can utilize to accomplish this task?

So instead we could do an:
dict= fopen("dictionary", "r")
regex_search(dict, "h.*i.*")

Thanks folks.

Since it sounds like you're using Linux, take a look here: Regular Expressions - The GNU C Library.

If I use regex and my program is compiled into some executable that regex should still work if the executable is run in another environment? Eventually I'm going to have to have a Java gui interacting with this C program (complicated stuff was coded in C and I don't have the knowledge of the content to rewrite it in Java)