rpmatch()
handles a user response to yes or no questions, with
support for internationalization.
response should be a null-terminated string containing a
user-supplied response, perhaps obtained with
fgets(3)
or
getline(3).
The user's language preference is taken into account per the
environment variables LANG, LC_MESSAGES, and LC_ALL,
if the program has called
setlocale(3)
to effect their changes.
Regardless of the locale, responses matching ^[Yy] are always
accepted as affirmative, and those matching ^[Nn] are always
accepted as negative.
RETURN VALUE
After examining
response,
rpmatch()
returns 0 for a recognized negative response ("no"), 1
for a recognized positive response ("yes"), and -1 when the value
of response is unrecognized.
ERRORS
A return value of -1 may indicate either an invalid input, or some
other error.
It is incorrect to only test if the return value is non-zero.
rpmatch()
can fail for any of the reasons that
regcomp(3)
or
regexec(3)
can fail; the cause of the error
is not available from errno or anywhere else, but indicates a
failure of the regex engine (but this case is indistinguishable from
that of an unrecognized value of response).
CONFORMING TO
rpmatch()
is not required by any standard, but
is available on a few other systems.
BUGS
The
rpmatch()
implementation looks at only the first character
of response.
As a consequence, "nyes" returns 0, and
"ynever; not in a million years" returns 1.
It would be preferable to accept input strings much more
strictly, for example (using the extended regular
expression notation described in
regex(7)):
^([yY]|yes|YES)$ and ^([nN]|no|NO)$.
EXAMPLE
The following program displays the results when
rpmatch()
is applied to the string given in the program's command-line argument.
This page is part of release 3.14 of the Linux
man-pages
project.
A description of the project,
and information about reporting bugs,
can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.