As a C programmer, be sure to check out the GNU libraries first! GNU has most of the stuff you need.

You don't need to embed Perl in your C code. You need to use a native C regular expression library.

Go and have a look at the GNU Rx library here. This is probably what you are looking for.

PS. Are you using GLib for your C programming? If not, I suggest you check out GLib too. Believe me, you will save a lot of development time by using the GLib library.