Contents of /code/branches/pcre16/ChangeLog

ChangeLog for PCRE
------------------

Version 3.8 18-Dec-01
---------------------

1. The experimental UTF-8 code was completely screwed up. It was packing the
bytes in the wrong order. How dumb can you get?


Version 3.7 29-Oct-01
---------------------

1. In updating pcretest to check change 1 of version 3.6, I screwed up.
This caused pcretest, when used on the test data, to segfault. Unfortunately,
this didn't happen under Solaris 8, where I normally test things.

2. The Makefile had to be changed to make it work on BSD systems, where 'make'
doesn't seem to recognize that ./xxx and xxx are the same file. (This entry
isn't in ChangeLog distributed with 3.7 because I forgot when I hastily made
this fix an hour or so after the initial 3.7 release.)


Version 3.6 23-Oct-01
---------------------

1. Crashed with /(sens|respons)e and \1ibility/ and "sense and sensibility" if
offsets passed as NULL with zero offset count.

2. The config.guess and config.sub files had not been updated when I moved to
the latest autoconf.


Version 3.5 15-Aug-01
---------------------

1. Added some missing #if !defined NOPOSIX conditionals in pcretest.c that
had been forgotten.

2. By using declared but undefined structures, we can avoid using "void"
definitions in pcre.h while keeping the internal definitions of the structures
private.

3. The distribution is now built using autoconf 2.50 and libtool 1.4. From a
user point of view, this means that both static and shared libraries are built
by default, but this can be individually controlled. More of the work of
handling this static/shared cases is now inside libtool instead of PCRE's make
file.

4. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is
useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets
relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so
there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc.

5. Upgrades to pcregrep:
   (i)   Added long-form option names like gnu grep.
   (ii)  Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase.
   (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories.
   (iv)  Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file.

6. pcre_exec() was referring to its "code" argument before testing that
argument for NULL (and giving an error if it was NULL).

7. Upgraded Makefile.in to allow for compiling in a different directory from
the source directory.

8. Tiny buglet in pcretest: when pcre_fullinfo() was called to retrieve the
options bits, the pointer it was passed was to an int instead of to an unsigned
long int. This mattered only on 64-bit systems.

9. Fixed typo (3.4/1) in pcre.h again. Sigh. I had changed pcre.h (which is
generated) instead of pcre.in, which it its source. Also made the same change
in several of the .c files.

10. A new release of gcc defines printf() as a macro, which broke pcretest
because it had an ifdef in the middle of a string argument for printf(). Fixed
by using separate calls to printf().

11. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure
script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix
systems, the value can be set in config.h.

12. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an
absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and
likewise updated the man page.

13. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed.
The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit.


Version 3.4 22-Aug-00
---------------------

1. Fixed typo in pcre.h: unsigned const char * changed to const unsigned char *.

2. Diagnose condition (?(0) as an error instead of crashing on matching.


Version 3.3 01-Aug-00
---------------------

1. If an octal character was given, but the value was greater than \377, it
was not getting masked to the least significant bits, as documented. This could
lead to crashes in some systems.

2. Perl 5.6 (if not earlier versions) accepts classes like [a-\d] and treats
the hyphen as a literal. PCRE used to give an error; it now behaves like Perl.

3. Added the functions pcre_free_substring() and pcre_free_substring_list().
These just pass their arguments on to (pcre_free)(), but they are provided
because some uses of PCRE bind it to non-C systems that can call its functions,
but cannot call free() or pcre_free() directly.

4. Add "make test" as a synonym for "make check". Corrected some comments in
the Makefile.

5. Add $(DESTDIR)/ in front of all the paths in the "install" target in the
Makefile.

6. Changed the name of pgrep to pcregrep, because Solaris has introduced a
command called pgrep for grepping around the active processes.

7. Added the beginnings of support for UTF-8 character strings.

8. Arranged for the Makefile to pass over the settings of CC, CFLAGS, and
RANLIB to ./ltconfig so that they are used by libtool. I think these are all
the relevant ones. (AR is not passed because ./ltconfig does its own figuring
out for the ar command.)


Version 3.2 12-May-00
---------------------

This is purely a bug fixing release.

1. If the pattern /((Z)+|A)*/ was matched agained ZABCDEFG it matched Z instead
of ZA. This was just one example of several cases that could provoke this bug,
which was introduced by change 9 of version 2.00. The code for breaking
infinite loops after an iteration that matches an empty string was't working
correctly.

2. The pcretest program was not imitating Perl correctly for the pattern /a*/g
when matched against abbab (for example). After matching an empty string, it
wasn't forcing anchoring when setting PCRE_NOTEMPTY for the next attempt; this
caused it to match further down the string than it should.

3. The code contained an inclusion of sys/types.h. It isn't clear why this
was there because it doesn't seem to be needed, and it causes trouble on some
systems, as it is not a Standard C header. It has been removed.

4. Made 4 silly changes to the source to avoid stupid compiler warnings that
were reported on the Macintosh. The changes were from

  while ((c = *(++ptr)) != 0 && c != '\n');
to
  while ((c = *(++ptr)) != 0 && c != '\n') ;

Totally extraordinary, but if that's what it takes...

5. PCRE is being used in one environment where neither memmove() nor bcopy() is
available. Added HAVE_BCOPY and an autoconf test for it; if neither
HAVE_MEMMOVE nor HAVE_BCOPY is set, use a built-in emulation function which
assumes the way PCRE uses memmove() (always moving upwards).

6. PCRE is being used in one environment where strchr() is not available. There
was only one use in pcre.c, and writing it out to avoid strchr() probably gives
faster code anyway.


Version 3.1 09-Feb-00
---------------------

The only change in this release is the fixing of some bugs in Makefile.in for
the "install" target:

(1) It was failing to install pcreposix.h.

(2) It was overwriting the pcre.3 man page with the pcreposix.3 man page.


Version 3.0 01-Feb-00
---------------------

1. Add support for the /+ modifier to perltest (to output $` like it does in
pcretest).

2. Add support for the /g modifier to perltest.

3. Fix pcretest so that it behaves even more like Perl for /g when the pattern
matches null strings.

4. Fix perltest so that it doesn't do unwanted things when fed an empty
pattern. Perl treats empty patterns specially - it reuses the most recent
pattern, which is not what we want. Replace // by /(?#)/ in order to avoid this
effect.

5. The POSIX interface was broken in that it was just handing over the POSIX
captured string vector to pcre_exec(), but (since release 2.00) PCRE has
required a bigger vector, with some working space on the end. This means that
the POSIX wrapper now has to get and free some memory, and copy the results.

6. Added some simple autoconf support, placing the test data and the
documentation in separate directories, re-organizing some of the
information files, and making it build pcre-config (a GNU standard). Also added
libtool support for building PCRE as a shared library, which is now the
default.

7. Got rid of the leading zero in the definition of PCRE_MINOR because 08 and
09 are not valid octal constants. Single digits will be used for minor values
less than 10.

8. Defined REG_EXTENDED and REG_NOSUB as zero in the POSIX header, so that
existing programs that set these in the POSIX interface can use PCRE without
modification.

9. Added a new function, pcre_fullinfo() with an extensible interface. It can
return all that pcre_info() returns, plus additional data. The pcre_info()
function is retained for compatibility, but is considered to be obsolete.

10. Added experimental recursion feature (?R) to handle one common case that
Perl 5.6 will be able to do with (?p{...}).

11. Added support for POSIX character classes like [:alpha:], which Perl is
adopting.


Version 2.08 31-Aug-99
----------------------

1. When startoffset was not zero and the pattern began with ".*", PCRE was not
trying to match at the startoffset position, but instead was moving forward to
the next newline as if a previous match had failed.

2. pcretest was not making use of PCRE_NOTEMPTY when repeating for /g and /G,
and could get into a loop if a null string was matched other than at the start
of the subject.

3. Added definitions of PCRE_MAJOR and PCRE_MINOR to pcre.h so the version can
be distinguished at compile time, and for completeness also added PCRE_DATE.

5. Added Paul Sokolovsky's minor changes to make it easy to compile a Win32 DLL
in GnuWin32 environments.


Version 2.07 29-Jul-99
----------------------

1. The documentation is now supplied in plain text form and HTML as well as in
the form of man page sources.

2. C++ compilers don't like assigning (void *) values to other pointer types.
In particular this affects malloc(). Although there is no problem in Standard
C, I've put in casts to keep C++ compilers happy.

3. Typo on pcretest.c; a cast of (unsigned char *) in the POSIX regexec() call
should be (const char *).

4. If NOPOSIX is defined, pcretest.c compiles without POSIX support. This may
be useful for non-Unix systems who don't want to bother with the POSIX stuff.
However, I haven't made this a standard facility. The documentation doesn't
mention it, and the Makefile doesn't support it.

5. The Makefile now contains an "install" target, with editable destinations at
the top of the file. The pcretest program is not installed.

6. pgrep -V now gives the PCRE version number and date.

7. Fixed bug: a zero repetition after a literal string (e.g. /abcde{0}/) was
causing the entire string to be ignored, instead of just the last character.

8. If a pattern like /"([^\\"]+|\\.)*"/ is applied in the normal way to a
non-matching string, it can take a very, very long time, even for strings of
quite modest length, because of the nested recursion. PCRE now does better in
some of these cases. It does this by remembering the last required literal
character in the pattern, and pre-searching the subject to ensure it is present
before running the real match. In other words, it applies a heuristic to detect
some types of certain failure quickly, and in the above example, if presented
with a string that has no trailing " it gives "no match" very quickly.

9. A new runtime option PCRE_NOTEMPTY causes null string matches to be ignored;
other alternatives are tried instead.


Version 2.06 09-Jun-99
----------------------

1. Change pcretest's output for amount of store used to show just the code
space, because the remainder (the data block) varies in size between 32-bit and
64-bit systems.

2. Added an extra argument to pcre_exec() to supply an offset in the subject to
start matching at. This allows lookbehinds to work when searching for multiple
occurrences in a string.

3. Added additional options to pcretest for testing multiple occurrences:

   /+   outputs the rest of the string that follows a match
   /g   loops for multiple occurrences, using the new startoffset argument
   /G   loops for multiple occurrences by passing an incremented pointer

4. PCRE wasn't doing the "first character" optimization for patterns starting
with \b or \B, though it was doing it for other lookbehind assertions. That is,
it wasn't noticing that a match for a pattern such as /\bxyz/ has to start with
the letter 'x'. On long subject strings, this gives a significant speed-up.


Version 2.05 21-Apr-99
----------------------

1. Changed the type of magic_number from int to long int so that it works
properly on 16-bit systems.

2. Fixed a bug which caused patterns starting with .* not to work correctly
when the subject string contained newline characters. PCRE was assuming
anchoring for such patterns in all cases, which is not correct because .* will
not pass a newline unless PCRE_DOTALL is set. It now assumes anchoring only if
DOTALL is set at top level; otherwise it knows that patterns starting with .*
must be retried after every newline in the subject.


Version 2.04 18-Feb-99
----------------------

1. For parenthesized subpatterns with repeats whose minimum was zero, the
computation of the store needed to hold the pattern was incorrect (too large).
If such patterns were nested a few deep, this could multiply and become a real
problem.

2. Added /M option to pcretest to show the memory requirement of a specific
pattern. Made -m a synonym of -s (which does this globally) for compatibility.

3. Subpatterns of the form (regex){n,m} (i.e. limited maximum) were being
compiled in such a way that the backtracking after subsequent failure was
pessimal. Something like (a){0,3} was compiled as (a)?(a)?(a)? instead of
((a)((a)(a)?)?)? with disastrous performance if the maximum was of any size.


Version 2.03 02-Feb-99
----------------------

1. Fixed typo and small mistake in man page.

2. Added 4th condition (GPL supersedes if conflict) and created separate
LICENCE file containing the conditions.

3. Updated pcretest so that patterns such as /abc\/def/ work like they do in
Perl, that is the internal \ allows the delimiter to be included in the
pattern. Locked out the use of \ as a delimiter. If \ immediately follows
the final delimiter, add \ to the end of the pattern (to test the error).

4. Added the convenience functions for extracting substrings after a successful
match. Updated pcretest to make it able to test these functions.


Version 2.02 14-Jan-99
----------------------

1. Initialized the working variables associated with each extraction so that
their saving and restoring doesn't refer to uninitialized store.

2. Put dummy code into study.c in order to trick the optimizer of the IBM C
compiler for OS/2 into generating correct code. Apparently IBM isn't going to
fix the problem.

3. Pcretest: the timing code wasn't using LOOPREPEAT for timing execution
calls, and wasn't printing the correct value for compiling calls. Increased the
default value of LOOPREPEAT, and the number of significant figures in the
times.

4. Changed "/bin/rm" in the Makefile to "-rm" so it works on Windows NT.

5. Renamed "deftables" as "dftables" to get it down to 8 characters, to avoid
a building problem on Windows NT with a FAT file system.


Version 2.01 21-Oct-98
----------------------

1. Changed the API for pcre_compile() to allow for the provision of a pointer
to character tables built by pcre_maketables() in the current locale. If NULL
is passed, the default tables are used.


Version 2.00 24-Sep-98
----------------------

1. Since the (>?) facility is in Perl 5.005, don't require PCRE_EXTRA to enable
it any more.

2. Allow quantification of (?>) groups, and make it work correctly.

3. The first character computation wasn't working for (?>) groups.

4. Correct the implementation of \Z (it is permitted to match on the \n at the
end of the subject) and add 5.005's \z, which really does match only at the
very end of the subject.

5. Remove the \X "cut" facility; Perl doesn't have it, and (?> is neater.

6. Remove the ability to specify CASELESS, MULTILINE, DOTALL, and
DOLLAR_END_ONLY at runtime, to make it possible to implement the Perl 5.005
localized options. All options to pcre_study() were also removed.

7. Add other new features from 5.005:

   $(?<=           positive lookbehind
   $(?<!           negative lookbehind
   (?imsx-imsx)    added the unsetting capability
                   such a setting is global if at outer level; local otherwise
   (?imsx-imsx:)   non-capturing groups with option setting
   (?(cond)re|re)  conditional pattern matching

   A backreference to itself in a repeated group matches the previous
   captured string.

8. General tidying up of studying (both automatic and via "study")
consequential on the addition of new assertions.

9. As in 5.005, unlimited repeated groups that could match an empty substring
are no longer faulted at compile time. Instead, the loop is forcibly broken at
runtime if any iteration does actually match an empty substring.

10. Include the RunTest script in the distribution.

11. Added tests from the Perl 5.005_02 distribution. This showed up a few
discrepancies, some of which were old and were also with respect to 5.004. They
have now been fixed.


Version 1.09 28-Apr-98
----------------------

1. A negated single character class followed by a quantifier with a minimum
value of one (e.g.  [^x]{1,6}  ) was not compiled correctly. This could lead to
program crashes, or just wrong answers. This did not apply to negated classes
containing more than one character, or to minima other than one.


Version 1.08 27-Mar-98
----------------------

1. Add PCRE_UNGREEDY to invert the greediness of quantifiers.

2. Add (?U) and (?X) to set PCRE_UNGREEDY and PCRE_EXTRA respectively. The
latter must appear before anything that relies on it in the pattern.


Version 1.07 16-Feb-98
----------------------

1. A pattern such as /((a)*)*/ was not being diagnosed as in error (unlimited
repeat of a potentially empty string).


Version 1.06 23-Jan-98
----------------------

1. Added Markus Oberhumer's little patches for C++.

2. Literal strings longer than 255 characters were broken.


Version 1.05 23-Dec-97
----------------------

1. Negated character classes containing more than one character were failing if
PCRE_CASELESS was set at run time.


Version 1.04 19-Dec-97
----------------------

1. Corrected the man page, where some "const" qualifiers had been omitted.

2. Made debugging output print "{0,xxx}" instead of just "{,xxx}" to agree with
input syntax.

3. Fixed memory leak which occurred when a regex with back references was
matched with an offsets vector that wasn't big enough. The temporary memory
that is used in this case wasn't being freed if the match failed.

4. Tidied pcretest to ensure it frees memory that it gets.

5. Temporary memory was being obtained in the case where the passed offsets
vector was exactly big enough.

6. Corrected definition of offsetof() from change 5 below.

7. I had screwed up change 6 below and broken the rules for the use of
setjmp(). Now fixed.


Version 1.03 18-Dec-97
----------------------

1. A erroneous regex with a missing opening parenthesis was correctly
diagnosed, but PCRE attempted to access brastack[-1], which could cause crashes
on some systems.

2. Replaced offsetof(real_pcre, code) by offsetof(real_pcre, code[0]) because
it was reported that one broken compiler failed on the former because "code" is
also an independent variable.

3. The erroneous regex a[]b caused an array overrun reference.

4. A regex ending with a one-character negative class (e.g. /[^k]$/) did not
fail on data ending with that character. (It was going on too far, and checking
the next character, typically a binary zero.) This was specific to the
optimized code for single-character negative classes.

5. Added a contributed patch from the TIN world which does the following:

  + Add an undef for memmove, in case the the system defines a macro for it.

  + Add a definition of offsetof(), in case there isn't one. (I don't know
    the reason behind this - offsetof() is part of the ANSI standard - but
    it does no harm).

  + Reduce the ifdef's in pcre.c using macro DPRINTF, thereby eliminating
    most of the places where whitespace preceded '#'. I have given up and
    allowed the remaining 2 cases to be at the margin.

  + Rename some variables in pcre to eliminate shadowing. This seems very
    pedantic, but does no harm, of course.

6. Moved the call to setjmp() into its own function, to get rid of warnings
from gcc -Wall, and avoided calling it at all unless PCRE_EXTRA is used.

7. Constructs such as \d{8,} were compiling into the equivalent of
\d{8}\d{0,65527} instead of \d{8}\d* which didn't make much difference to the
outcome, but in this particular case used more store than had been allocated,
which caused the bug to be discovered because it threw up an internal error.

8. The debugging code in both pcre and pcretest for outputting the compiled
form of a regex was going wrong in the case of back references followed by
curly-bracketed repeats.


Version 1.02 12-Dec-97
----------------------

1. Typos in pcre.3 and comments in the source fixed.

2. Applied a contributed patch to get rid of places where it used to remove
'const' from variables, and fixed some signed/unsigned and uninitialized
variable warnings.

3. Added the "runtest" target to Makefile.

4. Set default compiler flag to -O2 rather than just -O.


Version 1.01 19-Nov-97
----------------------

1. PCRE was failing to diagnose unlimited repeat of empty string for patterns
like /([ab]*)*/, that is, for classes with more than one character in them.

2. Likewise, it wasn't diagnosing patterns with "once-only" subpatterns, such
as /((?>a*))*/ (a PCRE_EXTRA facility).


Version 1.00 18-Nov-97
----------------------

1. Added compile-time macros to support systems such as SunOS4 which don't have
memmove() or strerror() but have other things that can be used instead.

2. Arranged that "make clean" removes the executables.


Version 0.99 27-Oct-97
----------------------

1. Fixed bug in code for optimizing classes with only one character. It was
initializing a 32-byte map regardless, which could cause it to run off the end
of the memory it had got.

2. Added, conditional on PCRE_EXTRA, the proposed (?>REGEX) construction.


Version 0.98 22-Oct-97
----------------------

1. Fixed bug in code for handling temporary memory usage when there are more
back references than supplied space in the ovector. This could cause segfaults.


Version 0.97 21-Oct-97
----------------------

1. Added the \X "cut" facility, conditional on PCRE_EXTRA.

2. Optimized negated single characters not to use a bit map.

3. Brought error texts together as macro definitions; clarified some of them;
fixed one that was wrong - it said "range out of order" when it meant "invalid
escape sequence".

4. Changed some char * arguments to const char *.

5. Added PCRE_NOTBOL and PCRE_NOTEOL (from POSIX).

6. Added the POSIX-style API wrapper in pcreposix.a and testing facilities in
pcretest.


Version 0.96 16-Oct-97
----------------------

1. Added a simple "pgrep" utility to the distribution.

2. Fixed an incompatibility with Perl: "{" is now treated as a normal character
unless it appears in one of the precise forms "{ddd}", "{ddd,}", or "{ddd,ddd}"
where "ddd" means "one or more decimal digits".

3. Fixed serious bug. If a pattern had a back reference, but the call to
pcre_exec() didn't supply a large enough ovector to record the related
identifying subpattern, the match always failed. PCRE now remembers the number
of the largest back reference, and gets some temporary memory in which to save
the offsets during matching if necessary, in order to ensure that
backreferences always work.

4. Increased the compatibility with Perl in a number of ways:

  (a) . no longer matches \n by default; an option PCRE_DOTALL is provided
      to request this handling. The option can be set at compile or exec time.

  (b) $ matches before a terminating newline by default; an option
      PCRE_DOLLAR_ENDONLY is provided to override this (but not in multiline
      mode). The option can be set at compile or exec time.

  (c) The handling of \ followed by a digit other than 0 is now supposed to be
      the same as Perl's. If the decimal number it represents is less than 10
      or there aren't that many previous left capturing parentheses, an octal
      escape is read. Inside a character class, it's always an octal escape,
      even if it is a single digit.

  (d) An escaped but undefined alphabetic character is taken as a literal,
      unless PCRE_EXTRA is set. Currently this just reserves the remaining
      escapes.

  (e) {0} is now permitted. (The previous item is removed from the compiled
      pattern).

5. Changed all the names of code files so that the basic parts are no longer
than 10 characters, and abolished the teeny "globals.c" file.

6. Changed the handling of character classes; they are now done with a 32-byte
bit map always.

7. Added the -d and /D options to pcretest to make it possible to look at the
internals of compilation without having to recompile pcre.


Version 0.95 23-Sep-97
----------------------

1. Fixed bug in pre-pass concerning escaped "normal" characters such as \x5c or
\x20 at the start of a run of normal characters. These were being treated as
real characters, instead of the source characters being re-checked.


Version 0.94 18-Sep-97
----------------------

1. The functions are now thread-safe, with the caveat that the global variables
containing pointers to malloc() and free() or alternative functions are the
same for all threads.

2. Get pcre_study() to generate a bitmap of initial characters for non-
anchored patterns when this is possible, and use it if passed to pcre_exec().


Version 0.93 15-Sep-97
----------------------

1. /(b)|(:+)/ was computing an incorrect first character.

2. Add pcre_study() to the API and the passing of pcre_extra to pcre_exec(),
but not actually doing anything yet.

3. Treat "-" characters in classes that cannot be part of ranges as literals,
as Perl does (e.g. [-az] or [az-]).

4. Set the anchored flag if a branch starts with .* or .*? because that tests
all possible positions.

5. Split up into different modules to avoid including unneeded functions in a
compiled binary. However, compile and exec are still in one module. The "study"
function is split off.

6. The character tables are now in a separate module whose source is generated
by an auxiliary program - but can then be edited by hand if required. There are
now no calls to isalnum(), isspace(), isdigit(), isxdigit(), tolower() or
toupper() in the code.

7. Turn the malloc/free funtions variables into pcre_malloc and pcre_free and
make them global. Abolish the function for setting them, as the caller can now
set them directly.


Version 0.92 11-Sep-97
----------------------

1. A repeat with a fixed maximum and a minimum of 1 for an ordinary character
(e.g. /a{1,3}/) was broken (I mis-optimized it).

2. Caseless matching was not working in character classes if the characters in
the pattern were in upper case.

3. Make ranges like [W-c] work in the same way as Perl for caseless matching.

4. Make PCRE_ANCHORED public and accept as a compile option.

5. Add an options word to pcre_exec() and accept PCRE_ANCHORED and
PCRE_CASELESS at run time. Add escapes \A and \I to pcretest to cause it to
pass them.

6. Give an error if bad option bits passed at compile or run time.

7. Add PCRE_MULTILINE at compile and exec time, and (?m) as well. Add \M to
pcretest to cause it to pass that flag.

8. Add pcre_info(), to get the number of identifying subpatterns, the stored
options, and the first character, if set.

9. Recognize C+ or C{n,m} where n >= 1 as providing a fixed starting character.


Version 0.91 10-Sep-97
----------------------

1. PCRE was failing to diagnose unlimited repeats of subpatterns that could
match the empty string as in /(a*)*/. It was looping and ultimately crashing.

2. PCRE was looping on encountering an indefinitely repeated back reference to
a subpattern that had matched an empty string, e.g. /(a|)\1*/. It now does what
Perl does - treats the match as successful.

****