extract c/cpp include file with regular expression

[Philip Semanchuk]

On Jul 23, 2009, at 11:46 AM, tiefeng wu wrote:

> Hi all!
> I need to parse c/cpp source files, one requirement is to extract
> included header file name.
> here is my solution:
>>>> p = re.compile(r'#\s*include\s+(?:(<)|("))(.*)(?(1)>)(?(2)")')
>>>> m = re.search(p, '#include <header.h>')
>>>> m.group(3)
> 'header.h'
>>>> m = re.search(p, '#include "header.h"')
>>>> m.group(3)
> 'header.h'
>>>> m = re.search(p, '#include <header.h"')
>>>> print(m)
> None
>>>> m = re.search(p, '#include "header.h>')
>>>> print(m)
> None
>
> Pretty ugly! And I know for a valid c/cpp source file, it will be not
> necessary to check and match '<' with '>' and " with ",
> but I'm wondering to see more elegant way to do such thing.

Hi tiefeng,
Regexes are always a little ugly IMO. =)

A side note -- does your parser need to handle /* comments like this  
one*/?  If so, then regular expressions are not going be sufficient.

Good luck
Philip