My God. Is that a Martian dialect?

I'm writing this in C using libpcre as the regexp engine. In isolation, it wouldn't be difficult to write the surrounding logic to walk through the string, evaluating the regexp one token at a time. But for various long and boring reasons it would fit into our app better if it could all be controlled by run time regexp configuration.

Thanks for the reply, though. I really should become facile with Perl. There are so many times I find myself needing a quick scripting solution but I end up using C because it's what I comfortable with.