Date: 2015may30 Language: C Q. C: Is C regex useful? As defined in #include <regex.h> A. Not really. It doesn't work nicely for me and it crashes sometimes on Linux. If the format is described (without examples!) in the re_format man page. https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=re_format&section=7 Here's an example that appears to work http://www.lemoda.net/c/unix-regex/index.html Some Alternatives: The PCRE (Perl Compatible) library http://davekb.com/search.php?target=pcre The C++ standard library has regex stuff.