NoRulez
if I have a regex (e.g.: "^Subject: (Re: |Fw: )*(?<subject>.*)")
I know I can access them with what["subject"] but is there a way to get a list or whatever of named captures/groups?
What would you expect to see? You asked for a named group "subject", which matches zero or more characters; as such, it will *always* match (if the whole match succeeds) but it might be empty. And as for "(Re: |Fw: )*", it will always be submatch 1, and its contents will most likely be whatever it found on the last time through. You do have one good question here: I don't know how Boost.Regex would signal that "(Re: |Fw: )*" didn't match at all. (Perl would use undef to distinguish between that case and the empty string, but C++ doesn't have that option.) And it looks like the answer is (surprise!) in the documentation already: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_48_0/libs/regex/doc/html/boost_regex/capture... (or: http://preview.tinyurl.com/846ls72 ) Hope this helps, t.