Thread: Regular expressions [Boost]

Hey guys. I've been reading about regular expressions for a few hours now because I thought it could do the job but apparently I either can't find the information I want or regular expressions aren't what I'm looking for. Basically, I want to have a function that searches into an std::list<> containing std::string objects and check if they match. I don't want a function that checks for perfect matches, I want a function that finds the closest possible matches so that if you have a mistake in your search field (such as inversed letters, unmatching case...) it still finds the closest possible matches. I thought regular expressions could do the job but apparently regular expressions are not flexible enough to do so, from what I've read so far. If someone can help me find a solution, I'd be more than happy.

Thanks to everyone.

Finding by ignoring case in regular expressions is usually just a matter of setting some "ignore case" flag. In perl, that would be a trailing modifier like /abc/i

Finding inverted character pairs is altogether harder. To match say "thier" as "their", you would need to match "th(ie|ei)r". If any pair can be inverted, then that becomes unpractical in a hurry.

Perhaps the soundex is what you want
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

I agree with Salem. Approximate matching is not the domain of regular expressions (and not of recursive descent parsers either, l2u), but that of Soundex keys, Levenshtein distances and similar algorithms.

Thank you guys. I decided just to stick with case-insensitive search which led me to this function:

Code:

bool TrouveSansCasse(std::string recherche, std::string element)
{
	boost::regex e(recherche, boost::regex::icase);
	return boost::regex_match(element, e, boost::match_default);
}

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out. I think boost::regex is appropriate in this case. I found out a way to make it so that it finds a phrase in a string without caring for case-sensitivity. I also added a small function to add a backslash in front of every dot in the string so that "12A3" cannot be correct using "12.3".

Here's the code:

Code:

void Cours::AnnulerChRegex(std::string& requete)
{
	const char* backslash = "\\";

	for(int i = 0; i < requete.size(); i++)
	{
		if(requete[i] == '.')
			requete.insert(i++, backslash);
	}
}

bool Cours::TrouveSansCasse(std::string recherche, std::string element)
{
	AnnulerChRegex(recherche);

	std::stringstream tmp;
	tmp << ".*" << recherche << ".*";
	boost::regex e(tmp.str(), boost::regex::icase);
	return boost::regex_match(element, e, boost::match_default);
}