I'd like to tag a question onto the coattails of this one. I haven't given it much thought, so if there's a terribly obvious reason this wouldn't work from a theoretical standpoint (or it's already in the implementation), please let me down easy. <g> Okay, I know there's no reasonable way to parse arbitrarily-nested constructs with regexes, but it's always seemed to me that it might be almost as useful to be able to extract the number of times a captured submatch with one of the repetition operators following actually matched. I also can't think of a reason it couldn't be done, off the top of my head. Your take?
My take is it's already been done: see the section on repeated captures in http://www.boost.org/libs/regex/doc/captures.html Does that answer your question? John.