How to: Use Regular Expressions to Extract Data Fields (C++/CLI)

The following code example demonstrates the use of regular expressions to extract data from a formatted string. The following code example uses the Regex class to specify a pattern that corresponds to an e-mail address. This patter includes field identifiers that can be used to retrieve the user and host name portions of each e-mail address. The Match class is used to perform the actual pattern matching. If the given e-mail address is valid, the user name and host names are extracted and displayed.

Example

// Regex_extract.cpp
// compile with: /clr
#using <System.dll>

using namespace System;
using namespace System::Text::RegularExpressions;

int main()
{
    array<String^>^ address=
    {
        "jay@southridgevideo.com",
        "barry@adatum.com",
        "treyresearch.net",
        "karen@proseware.com"
    };

    Regex^ emailregex = gcnew Regex("(?<user>[^@])@(?<host>.)");

    for (int i=0; i<address->Length; i+)
    {
        Match^ m = emailregex->Match( address[i] );
        Console::Write("\n{0,25}", address[i]);

        if ( m->Success ) 
        {
            Console::Write("   User='{0}'", 
            m->Groups["user"]->Value);
            Console::Write("   Host='{0}'", 
            m->Groups["host"]->Value);
        }
        else 
            Console::Write("   (invalid email address)");
        }

    Console::WriteLine("");
    return 0;
}

See Also

Other Resources

.NET Framework Regular Expressions

.NET Programming Guide