I am port­ing pyspf to C (long sto­ry, and I am stupid for try­ing). But of course, C is not python.

So you don't have anything nearly as nice as re.­com­pile("what­ev­er").s­plit("­somestring").

What is that good for, you may ask? Well, to do things like split­ting email ad­dress­es while val­i­dat­ing them, or in this spe­cif­ic case, to val­i­date SPF mech­a­nisms (n­ev­er­mind what those are).

But hey, you can al­ways do this (ex­cuse me while I weep a lit­tle):

struct bstrList *re_split(const char *string, const char *pattern)
{
    int status;
    regex_t re;
    regmatch_t pmatch[20];

    if (regcomp(&re, pattern, REG_ICASE|REG_EXTENDED) != 0)
    {
        return(0);      /* Report error. */
    }

    bstring tmp=bfromcstr("");
    char *ptr=(char *)string;

    for (;;)
    {
        status = regexec(&re, ptr, (size_t)20, pmatch, 0);
        if (status==REG_NOMATCH)
        {
            break;
        }
        bcatblk (tmp,ptr,pmatch[0].rm_so);
        bconchar (tmp,0);
        bcatblk (tmp,ptr+pmatch[0].rm_so,pmatch[0].rm_eo-pmatch[0].rm_so);
        bconchar (tmp,0);
        ptr=ptr+pmatch[0].rm_eo;

    }
    regfree(&re);
    bcatblk (tmp,ptr,strlen(string)-(ptr-string));
    struct bstrList *l= bsplit(tmp,0);
    return l;
}

And that is prob­a­bly wrong for some cas­es (and it does­n't split the ex­act same way as Python, but that's what unit test­ing is for).

I must be miss­ing some­thing that makes reg­comp & friends nicer to use. Right? Right?