Capture multiple texts. - regex

Question

I have a problem with Regular Expressions.
Consider we have a string
S= "[sometext1],[sometext],[sometext]....,[sometext]"
The number of the "sometexts" is unknown,it's user's input and can vary from one to ..for example,1000.
[sometext] is some sequence of characters ,but each of them is not ",",so ,we can say [^,].
I want to capture the text by some regular expression and then to iterate through the texts in cycle.
QRegExp p=new QRegExp("???");
p.exactMatch(S);
for(int i=1;i<=p.captureCount;i++)
{
SomeFunction(p.cap(i));
}
For example,if the number of sometexts is 3,we can use something like this:
([^,]*),([^,]*),([^,]*).
So,i don't know what to write instead of "???" for any arbitrary n.
I'm using Qt 4.7,I didn't find how to do this on the class reference page.
I know we can do it through the cycles without regexps or to generate the regex itself in cycle,but these solutions don't fit me because the actual problem is a bit more complex than this..

Answer 1

A possible regular expression to match what you want is:
([^,]+?)(,|$)
This will match string that end with a coma "," or the end of the line. I was not sure that the last element would have a coma or not.
An example using this regex in C#:
String textFromFile = "[sometext1],[sometext2],[sometext3],[sometext4]";
foreach (Match match in Regex.Matches(textFromFile, "([^,]+?)(,|$)"))
{
String placeHolder = match.Groups[1].Value;
System.Console.WriteLine(placeHolder);
}
This code prints the following to screen:
[sometext1]
[sometext2]
[sometext3]
[sometext4]
Using an example for QRegex I found online here is an attempt at a solution closer to what you are looking for:
(example I found was at: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qq/qq01-seriously-weird-qregexp.html)
QRegExp rx( "([^,]+?)(,|$)");
rx.setMinimal( TRUE ); // this is if the Qregex does not understand the +? non-greedy notation.
int pos = 0;
while ( (pos = rx.search(text, pos)) != -1 )
{
someFunction(rx.cap(1));
}
I hope this helps.

Answer 2

We can do that, you can use non-capturing to hook in the comma and then ask for many of the block:
Try:
QRexExp p=new QRegExp("([^,]*)(?:,([^,]*))*[.]")
Non-capturing is explained in the docs: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/qregexp.html
Note that I also bracketed the . since it has meaning in RegExp and you seemed to want it to be a literal period.

Answer 3

I only know of .Net that lets you specify a variable number of captures with a single
expression. Example - (capture.*me)+
It creates a capture object that can be itterated over. Even then it only simulates
what every other regex engine provides.
Most engines provide an incremental match until no matches left from within a
loop. The global flag tells the engine to keep matching from where the last
sucessfull match left off.
Example (in Perl):
while ( $string =~ /([^,]+)/g ) { print $1,"\n" }