PCRE-parser
Programming problem for a second stage interview.
This program receives an input string and turns this into an appropriate Regex in order to perform matching using the PCRE library.
eg: "foo %{0} is a %{1}"
The string can have modifiers:
%{#} in an input string will match any
characters in its place.
%{#S#} in an input string will match
any characters including a fixed number
of spaces in its place and it will capture.
%{#G} in an input string will match
any characters in its place and it will
capture.
Building
Run make to build but be wary there may be linker issues with libpcre - I had some issues statically linking it on OS X and got it to work this way. You may need to simply add -lpcre.
Running
eg. cat input.txt | ./pcre_parser "foo %{0} is a %{1}"