Re: [Boost-users] Using regex on a file

From: John Maddock (john_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-08-31 04:54:40

Dave wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I would like to programmatically search a (large) binary file for a
> particular text string and get a boolean result back - either the
> string appeared or it did not.
>
> I imagine whatever I end up implementing will be
> platform-independent, but I'll state anyway that I am using Visual
> C++.
> My first thought was to use regex_search and pass it two stream
> iterators, one pointing to the beginning of the file and one
> representing the end of the file. Alas, this won't work since
> regex_search requires bidirectional iterators, which stream iterators
> are not.
> I would appreciate any suggestions as to how I can most efficiently
> and elegantly achieve my goal. Thank you!

A memory mapped file would be my first choice, but if the text is too long 
even for that then see 
http://www.boost.org/libs/regex/doc/partial_matches.html

HTH, John.