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News about PCRE releases |
News about PCRE releases |
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Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 |
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The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more |
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conventional "BSD" licence. |
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In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes |
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in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes |
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are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The |
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new features are: |
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1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every |
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item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position |
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in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. |
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2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character |
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tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used |
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at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the |
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default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled |
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pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything |
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special unless you are using custom tables. |
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3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to |
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request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the |
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subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing |
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an input field as it is being typed. |
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4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which |
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means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only |
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the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this |
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support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the |
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size of the library dramatically. |
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5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. |
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6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a |
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different host with the opposite endianness. |
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7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. |
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The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no |
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longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This |
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makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching |
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possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a |
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result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. |
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Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 |
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Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features: |
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1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive |
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function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows |
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things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks. |
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2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to |
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check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the |
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latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET. |
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3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code. |
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Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 |
Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 |
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