matching fields

[deadowl]

I'm writing a program that needs to be able to match different types of fields.
These fields include date/time, numbers, and strings. I'm just not quite sure of how I want to accomplish this task.

I could fork to grep for string matching, I am not experienced enough to know whether or not this is a good design choice.

Still, I don't know if I'd need to build my own matching system for date/time and numbers. I would think general math and comparison operations would be good for numbers, I don't know what might be good for matching a date/time generically.

Any ideas?

[wje_lf]

Have you decided yet what programming language you'll use?

[deadowl]

Well, I'm using C. I understand it would probably be a lot easier in Perl, but I haven't taught myself Perl as of today.

[wje_lf]

If you're using C, then do this at the command line:

man -a regex

(not regexp).

You'll have fun using that regular expression library in your program. Another alternative is:

man pcre

You could fork() and use grep, but what's the sport in that?

If you do decide to do it that way, don't call grep and use fork(); call grep by using popen(). It takes care of a lot of the extra processing bookwork for you. (Don't forget that pclose() at the end, to maximize longterm maintainability of your code.)

Hope this helps.