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RPMATCH(3)                    Linux Programmer's Manual                    RPMATCH(3)

NAME         top

       rpmatch - determine if the answer to a question is affirmative or negative

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <stdlib.h>

       int rpmatch(const char *response);

   Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):

       rpmatch(): _SVID_SOURCE

DESCRIPTION         top

       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         top

       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         top

       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 nonzero.

       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         top

       rpmatch() is not required by any standard, but is available on a few other
       systems.

BUGS         top

       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         top

       The following program displays the results when rpmatch() is applied to the
       string given in the program's command-line argument.

       #define _SVID_SOURCE
       #include <locale.h>
       #include <stdlib.h>
       #include <string.h>
       #include <stdio.h>

       int
       main(int argc, char *argv[])
       {
           if (argc != 2 || strcmp(argv[1], "--help") == 0) {
               fprintf(stderr, "%s response\n", argv[0]);
               exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
           }

           setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
           printf("rpmatch() returns: %d\n", rpmatch(argv[1]));
           exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
       }

SEE ALSO         top

       fgets(3), getline(3), nl_langinfo(3), regcomp(3), setlocale(3)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of release 3.32 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/.

GNU                                   2007-07-26                           RPMATCH(3)

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