c++ regex substring wrong pattern found - c++

Question

I'm trying to understand the logic on the regex in c++
std::string s ("Ni Ni Ni NI");
std::regex e ("(Ni)");
std::smatch sm;
std::regex_search (s,sm,e);
std::cout << "string object with " << sm.size() << " matches\n";
This form shouldn't give me the number of substrings matching my pattern? Because it always give me 1 match and it says that the match is [Ni , Ni]; but i need it to find every single pattern; they should be 3 and like this [Ni][Ni][Ni]

Answer 1

The function std::regex_search only returns the results for the first match found in your string.
Here is a code, merged from yours and from cplusplus.com. The idea is to search for the first match, analyze it, and then start again using the rest of the string (that is to say, the sub-string that directly follows the match that was found, which can be retrieved thanks to match_results::suffix ).
Note that the regex has two capturing groups (Ni*) and ([^ ]*).
std::string s("the knights who say Niaaa and Niooo");
std::smatch m;
std::regex e("(Ni*)([^ ]*)");
while (std::regex_search(s, m, e))
{
for (auto x : m)
std::cout << x.str() << " ";
std::cout << std::endl;
s = m.suffix().str();
}
This gives the following output:
Niaaa Ni aaa
Niooo Ni ooo
As you can see, for every call to regex_search, we have the following information:
the content of the whole match,
the content of every capturing group.
Since we have two capturing groups, this gives us 3 strings for every regex_search.
EDIT: in your case if you want to retrieve every "Ni", all you need to do is to replace
std::regex e("(Ni*)([^ ]*)");
with
std::regex e("(Ni)");
You still need to iterate over your string, though.