std::regex_token_iterator

std::regex_token_iterator is a read-only LegacyForwardIterator that accesses the individual sub-matches of every match of a regular expression within the underlying character sequence. It can also be used to access the parts of the sequence that were not matched by the given regular expression (e.g. as a tokenizer).

On construction, it constructs an std::regex_iterator and on every increment it steps through the requested sub-matches from the current match_results, incrementing the underlying regex_iterator when incrementing away from the last submatch.

The default-constructed std::regex_token_iterator is the end-of-sequence iterator. When a valid std::regex_token_iterator is incremented after reaching the last submatch of the last match, it becomes equal to the end-of-sequence iterator. Dereferencing or incrementing it further invokes undefined behavior.

Just before becoming the end-of-sequence iterator, a std::regex_token_iterator may become a suffix iterator, if the index -1 (non-matched fragment) appears in the list of the requested submatch indexes. Such iterator, if dereferenced, returns a match_results corresponding to the sequence of characters between the last match and the end of sequence.

A typical implementation of std::regex_token_iterator holds the underlying std::regex_iterator, a container (e.g. std::vector<int>) of the requested submatch indexes, the internal counter equal to the index of the submatch, a pointer to std::sub_match, pointing at the current submatch of the current match, and a std::match_results object containing the last non-matched character sequence (used in tokenizer mode).

Type requirements

Specializations

Several specializations for common character sequence types are defined:

Member types

Member functions

Notes

It is the programmer's responsibility to ensure that the std::basic_regex object passed to the iterator's constructor outlives the iterator. Because the iterator stores a std::regex_iterator which stores a pointer to the regex, incrementing the iterator after the regex was destroyed results in undefined behavior.

Example

#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
#include <algorithm>
#include <iterator>
#include <regex>
 
int main()
{
   std::string text = "Quick brown fox.";
   // tokenization (non-matched fragments)
   // Note that regex is matched only two times: when the third value is obtained
   // the iterator is a suffix iterator.
   std::regex ws_re("\\s+"); // whitespace
   std::copy( std::sregex_token_iterator(text.begin(), text.end(), ws_re, -1),
              std::sregex_token_iterator(),
              std::ostream_iterator<std::string>(std::cout, "\n"));
 
   // iterating the first submatches
   std::string html = "<p><a href=\"http://google.com\">google</a> "
                      "< a HREF =\"http://apiref.com\">cppreference</a>\n</p>";
   std::regex url_re("<\\s*A\\s+[^>]*href\\s*=\\s*\"([^\"]*)\"", std::regex::icase);
   std::copy( std::sregex_token_iterator(html.begin(), html.end(), url_re, 1),
              std::sregex_token_iterator(),
              std::ostream_iterator<std::string>(std::cout, "\n"));
}

Quick
brown
fox.
http://google.com
http://apiref.com