.NET Regular expressions on bytes instead of chars

Question

I\'m trying to do some parsing that will be easier using regular expressions.

The input is an array (or enumeration) of bytes.

I don\'t want to convert the b

Answer 1

Well, if I faced this problem, I would DO the C++/CLI wrapper, except I'd create specialized code for what I want to achieve. Eventually develop the wrapper with time to do general things, but this just an option.

The first step is to wrap the Boost::Regex input and output only. Create specialized functions in C++ that do all the stuff you want and use CLI just to pass the input data to the C++ code and then fetch the result back with the CLI. This doesn't look to me like too much work to do.

Update:

Let me try to clarify my point. Even though I may be wrong, I believe you wont be able to find any .NET Binary Regex implementation that you could use. That is why - whether you like it or not - you will be forced to choose between CLI wrapper and bytes-to-chars conversion to use .NET's Regex. In my opinion the wrapper is better choice, because it will be working faster. I did not do any benchmarking, this is just an assumption based on:

1. Using wrapper you just have to cast the pointer type (bytes <-> chars).
2. Using .NET's Regex you have to convert each byte of the input.