Re: regex with ada?

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

Eric Merritt <cyberlync@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.1009494362.8213.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>...
> > 
 
> I am afraid I feel the overwhelming compulsion to
> point out the regular expresions are quite allot more
> then simply wildcards. That being said, I am glad to
> know thier is a gnat extension that supports them.


There are actually several packages that are relevant in
GNAT (GNAT.Regexp, GNAT.Regpat, and GNAT.Spitbol.Patterns). The first
two support regular expressions Unix-style in two different flavors,
the third supports the much more powerful notion of pattern matching
and replacement found in SNOBOL-4.

Note that these are not extensions, they are simply Ada
packages supplied with GNAT. It is conceivable that they
might be adapted to work with other Ada compilers, though
likely you will have trouble with unsupported pragmas and
attributes (the GNAT packages feel quite free to use GNAT
pragmas and attributes, and in some cases, these uses are
quite fundamental, e.g. the use of Unrestricted_Access in
the GNAT.Spitbol.Patterns.

Robert Dewar