Now I tried to integrate wregex in the software, but it just would not compile complaining about missing wstring (and defined BOOST_NO_WREGEX). I tried to make up my own regex character traits class, but this does not seem to help, because some other classes/types (such as sub_match) make use of basic_string<charT>.
Is there any way to bypass the problem?
OK all the following comments apply to 1.33.1. There are two easy options and one harder option: Easy option #1, use STLport if it supports wstring. Easy option #2, use the ICU/Unicode support in 1.33.1 to search your data directly (as long as it's in UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32 format). You'll get back iterators into your data (whatever encoding it's in), so there's no problems determining offsets etc. The slightly harder option, as you've guessed already: write your own traits class, from 1.33 onwards you can use vector<charT> in place of basic_string<charT> in the traits class. If you take a look at the traits class used by the Unicode/ICU support code it should give you the general idea, and there are docs here: http://www.boost.org/libs/regex/doc/concepts.html#traits And finally... if you data is in MBCS format you might get some ideas from the unicode suuport code in 1.33.x: basically in order to handle multibyte encodings it converts from UTF-8 or UTF-16 to UTF-32 code points on the fly. Of course this requires that the on-the-fly conversions are bidirectional, this works OK for Unicode, but I'm not sure about how far you would get with other encodings. HTH, John.