Regular expressions are unfortunately out of the question (no good cross-platform support and third-party libraries aren't something we want to take on as dependencies) but you can use fscanf() or sscanf() to do field-based parsing.

That said, you're probably in for a rough time making it work on multiple platforms. ip is a Linux-ism; on the BSDs, you have to shell out to ifconfig and deal with any platform differences in its output.

Regular expressions are unfortunately out of the question (no good cross-platform support and third-party libraries aren't something we want to take on as dependencies) but you can use fscanf() or sscanf() to do field-based parsing.

That said, you're probably in for a rough time making it work on multiple platforms. ip is a Linux-ism; on the BSDs, you have to shell out to ifconfig and deal with any platform differences in its output.

I didn't want to put it into libuv, obviously... just into the test/ harness. For Linux/UNIX it shouldn't be a problem, but for Windows we'd need std::regex wrappers to call from C.

I understand but that's precisely what I mean. For various reasons we're unlikely to accept patches that mix C and C++.

On the subject of regcomp() and friends: once you start using that, you also have to start thinking about setlocale() and when to call or not call it because the locale affects pattern matching. It tends to snowball in complexity.

I understand but that's precisely what I mean. For various reasons we're unlikely to accept patches that mix C and C++.

On the subject of regcomp() and friends: once you start using that, you also have to start thinking about setlocale() and when to call or not call it because the locale affects pattern matching. It tends to snowball in complexity.

I imagine for output from commands, you'd want the command to run in the C locale, and parse its output similarly. What about libpcre2? That's a single C-based library that runs on everything, and is POSIX-compliant.

I expect there is going to be very little enthusiasm in taking on libpcre2 as a dependency. One of libuv's selling features is the simplicity with which you can build and use it, you only need libc.

There are some single header file regular expression libraries out there that might be acceptable as a middle ground, but caveat lector, they also need to be license compatible.