A compact Regular Expression in C++ for memory restricted applications.
There is a blog post for background material at https://practicalarduinoc.blogspot.com/2019/10/arduino-regular-expressions.html
There are versions here for 8 bit (and other) Arduinos and more general C++ applications.
The aim was to develop a compact regular expression class that had a minimal impact upon working memory (the SRAM component on an Arduino). The range of options is therefore limited but hopefuly enough to meet most needs.
| Regex component | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ^ | Start anchor |
| $ | End anchor |
| c | match a character literal |
| \d | match digits 0 to 9 |
| \D | matched if not digit |
| \w | match alphanumeric char |
| \W | matched if not alphanumeric |
| \s | matches whitespace |
| \S | match if not whitespace |
| . (full stop) | match any character not a line feed (\n) |
| * | match zero or more of previous construct |
| + | match one or more of previous construct |
| ? | match zero or one of previous construct |
| [a-z] or [0-9A-H] | match to one or more character ranges |
| [abcd] | match to any one of a set of characters |
| [^a-z] | match if not in range (eg. not a to z) |
| [^defg] | match if not in list |
Lists of characters within square brackets can contain meta characters (such as \d). Characters such as ‘*’ or ‘?’ need to be escaped if they are outside of a list and should be matched just as a character. There is also support for a match to start at any position within the target text and a facility to return the length of any matched text.
The usage starts by creating an instance of the Regex class passing a pointer to a regular expression to the constructor. Then the match() method is passed a pointer to a target char array. The method will return the position of the first match in the target string or -1 if no match is found. The match method can also be passed an additional integer argument to set the point in the target string for the search for a match to begin (zero based). The class getMatchLength() method will return the number of characters in the target string that were matched by the regular expression.
Further work
There is no immediate intention to tackle the following but do feel free to wade in if you feel like it.
Numeric quantifiers could be added.
| Quantifier | Meaning |
|---|---|
| {3} | match exactly 3 times |
| {2, 4} | match between 2 and 4 times |
| {2,} | match 2 or more times |
The union component of the RE struct could have an array of two (uint8_t) unsigned 8 bit integers added which would allow plenty of scope without increasing the size of the struct on 8 bit boards.
Another tweak could be to allow lists and ranges to be mixed in the same class (e.g. [ext0-9]. It makes sense as a range is just shorthand for a number of items in the list.