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

From: Pavol Droba (droba_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-12-13 12:49:44

On Sat, Dec 13, 2003 at 12:12:46PM -0000, John Maddock wrote:
> > 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.

Alternatively, you can try to get string_algo library from the boost-sandbox.
There is an algorithm replace_regex, that does in-place regex replacement.

Pavol