phorward (libphorward) is a C/C++ programming library, providing useful extensions like dynamic data structures, enhanced string management functions and regular expressions.

The library provides several modules which can be used together or on their own:

• any provides an extensible data structure and interface to store, convert and handle variables of different value types (some kind of "variant" data type) within one data structure.
• base provides tools for dynamic data structures and utility functions used throughout the library, including linked lists, hash-tables, stacks and arrays.
• regex provides tools for constructing, parsing, processing and modifying regular expressions.
• string is an extended string processing library with useful functions for char* and wchar_t*-string manipulation.

The library also comes with some tools and command-line helpers, including a documentation generator and a functions prototype generator for C modules.

A recently updated, full documentation can be found here, and is also locally available after installation.

Building phorward is simple as every GNU-style open source program. Extract the downloaded release tarball or clone the source repository into a directory of your choice.

Then, run

./configure
make
make install

And you're ready to go!

Alternatively, there is also a simpler method for setting up a local build system for development and testing purposes.

To do so, type

$ make -f Makefile.gnu make_install
$ make

This locally compiles the library or parts of it, and is ideal for development purposes.

On Windows systems, the usage of Cygwin or another Unix shell environment is required.

The Phorward C/C++ Library also perfectly cross-compiles on Linux using the MinGW and MinGW_x86-64 compilers.

# To compile into 32-Bit Windows executables, configure with
$ ./configure --host=i486-mingw32 --prefix=/usr/i486-mingw32

# To compile into 64-Bit Windows executables, configure with 
$ ./configure --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --prefix=/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32

libphorward is developed and maintained by Jan Max Meyer, Phorward Software Technologies.

Contributions by Marco Wegner and AGS.

You may use, modify and distribute this software under the terms and conditions of the 3-clause BSD license. The full license terms can be obtained from the file LICENSE.

Copyright (C) 2006-2019 by Phorward Software Technologies, Jan Max Meyer.