Is str ~ regex the root of all evil, or the leaf of all good?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

bearophile wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu:
> 
>> foreach (i; 0 .. iter.captures) writeln(iter.capture(i));
> 
>> "Capture" is the traditional term as far as I understand. I can't
>> use .length because it messes up with range semantics. "len" would
>> be too confusing. "ncaptures" is too cute. Nobody's perfect :o).
> 
>>> "group" may be a struct that defines toString and can be cast to
>>> string, and also keeps the starting position of the group into
>>> the original string.
> 
>> That sounds good.
> 
> Well, then match() may return just a dynamic array of such
> groups/captures. So such array has both .length and opIndex. It looks
> simple :-)

Looks simple but it isn't. How do you advance to the next match?

foreach (m; "abracadabra".match("(.)a", "g")) writeln(m.capture[0]);

This should print:

r
c
d
r

There's need to make progress in the matching, not in the capture. How 
do you distinguish among them?


Andrei