c - Posix regular expression non-greedy

Question

Is there a way to use a non-greedy regular expression in C like one can use in Perl? I tried several things, but it's actually not working.

I'm currently using this regex that matches an IP address and the corresponding HTTP request, but it's greedy although I'm using the *?:

([0-9]{1,3}(\.[0-9]{1,3}){3})(.*?)HTTP/1.1

In this example, it always matches the whole string:

#include <regex.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {

    int a, i;
    regex_t re;
    regmatch_t pm;
    char *mpages = "TEST 127.0.0.1 GET /test.php HTTP/1.1" 404 525 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT  HTTP/1.1 TEST";

    a = regcomp(&re, "([0-9]{1,3}(\.[0-9]{1,3}){3})(.*?)HTTP/1.1", REG_EXTENDED);

    if(a!=0)
        printf(" -> Error: Invalid Regex");

    a = regexec(&re, &mpages[0], 1, &pm, REG_EXTENDED);

    if(a==0) {

        for(i = pm.rm_so; i < pm.rm_eo; i++)
            printf("%c", mpages[i]);
        printf("
");
    }
    return 0;
}

$ ./regtest

127.0.0.1 GET /test.php HTTP/1.1" 404 525 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT HTTP/1.1

Answer 1

No, there are no non-greedy quantifiers in POSIX regular expressions. But there is a library that provides perl-like regular expressions for C: http://www.pcre.org/