[Boost-users] [regex] "Invalid content of repeat range" when using greediness and capture operators?

21 May 2006

      I've run into a problem where I'm getting an "Invalid content of
repeat range" when attempting to match a string using greediness and
capture operators.  I'm using the following function (basically taken
from the "print captures" example in the regex docs):

void find_matches(const std::string& regx, const std::string& text)
{
	boost::regex e(regx, boost::regex::perl);
	boost::smatch what;
	std::cout << "Expression:  \"" << regx << "\"\n";
	std::cout << "Text:        \"" << text << "\"\n";
	if(boost::regex_match(text, what, e)) //, boost::match_extra))
	{
		... [snip] ...
	}
	else
	{
		...
	}
}

... invoked by:

find_matches(html, "<p class=\"priceBest\"><a href=(.*?)>");

The pattern I'm trying to match is working in Perl program (e.g. if
($html =~ m|<p class="priceBest"><a href=(.*?)>|gs) {...} ), so it
seems like the pattern should be syntactically correct.  I'm building
on Mac OS X 10.4 (Intel) with Boost 1.33.1.

I'm new to Boost and probably spoiled by Perl pattern matching, so I'm
guessing I'm missing something simple.  Any help or suggestions are
appreciated!

Thanks,
Chris Hart

[Boost-users] [regex] "Invalid content of repeat range" when using greediness and capture operators?

Christopher Hart