pcre_copy_named_substring(3)

pcre_copy_named_substring3

Perl-compatible regular expressions

Usage

#include <pcre.h>

int pcre_copy_named_substring(const pcre *code,
     const char *subject, int *ovector,
     int stringcount, const char *stringname,
     char *buffer, int buffersize);

int pcre16_copy_named_substring(const pcre16 *code,
     PCRE_SPTR16 subject, int *ovector,
     int stringcount, PCRE_SPTR16 stringname,
     PCRE_UCHAR16 *buffer, int buffersize);

int pcre32_copy_named_substring(const pcre32 *code,
     PCRE_SPTR32 subject, int *ovector,
     int stringcount, PCRE_SPTR32 stringname,
     PCRE_UCHAR32 *buffer, int buffersize);

Overview

This is a convenience function for extracting a captured substring, identified by name, into a given buffer. The arguments are:

code Pattern that was successfully matched
subject Subject that has been successfully matched
ovector Offset vector that pcre[16|32]_exec() used
stringcount Value returned by pcre[16|32]_exec()
stringname Name of the required substring
buffer Buffer to receive the string
buffersize Size of buffer

The yield is the length of the substring, PCRE_ERROR_NOMEMORY if the buffer was too small, or PCRE_ERROR_NOSUBSTRING if the string name is invalid.

There is a complete description of the PCRE native API in the pcreapi page and a description of the POSIX API in the pcreposix page.

Releases

11 releases since Debian 3.1 (Sarge); the text changed 2 times.

  1. 3.1–6.0
  2. 7
  3. 8–Arch

From pcre 8.45-5 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.