Re: [Boost-users] using regex for in-place string modification

From: John Maddock (john_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-12-13 07:12:46

> I want to use regex to modify a string in place.  In particular, I've read
> the contents of a file into a string, now I want to do some search/replace
> functions on the string, then write the modified string back out to the
> original file.  I've looked through the regex documentation, including the
> October 2001 DDJ article, but I don't see any way to modify a string in
> place.  From what I can tell, regex_merge looks like it does the kind of
> thing I want, except it doesn't seem to modify in place.  I'd prefer to
> avoid creating two strings of each file's contents, one before regex
> processsing, one after.  Is there functionality in regex that will let me
> modify a string in place?

Not directly, but you could:

repeated search through the string finding each match, then for each match
found replace the matched section with the result of regex_format, and
restart the search from the appropriate place.

John.