| 1 |
News about PCRE releases |
News about PCRE releases |
| 2 |
------------------------ |
------------------------ |
| 3 |
|
|
| 4 |
A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It builds |
Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 |
| 5 |
a Makefile and a config.h file. |
--------------------- |
| 6 |
|
|
| 7 |
|
There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional |
| 8 |
|
functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new |
| 9 |
|
functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the |
| 10 |
|
documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. |
| 11 |
|
|
| 12 |
|
1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. |
| 13 |
|
|
| 14 |
|
2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java |
| 15 |
|
package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic |
| 16 |
|
grouping". |
| 17 |
|
|
| 18 |
|
3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position |
| 19 |
|
is at the start point of the match. |
| 20 |
|
|
| 21 |
|
4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides |
| 22 |
|
with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE |
| 23 |
|
is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to |
| 24 |
|
its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at |
| 25 |
|
appropriate points. |
| 26 |
|
|
| 27 |
|
5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really |
| 28 |
|
easy to get totally confused. |
| 29 |
|
|
| 30 |
|
6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to |
| 31 |
|
name a group. |
| 32 |
|
|
| 33 |
|
7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an |
| 34 |
|
option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. |
| 35 |
|
|
| 36 |
|
8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. |
| 37 |
|
These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate |
| 38 |
|
directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking |
| 39 |
|
between the pages has been installed. |
| 40 |
|
|
| 41 |
|
|
| 42 |
|
Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 |
| 43 |
|
--------------------- |
| 44 |
|
|
| 45 |
|
1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf |
| 46 |
|
and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS |
| 47 |
|
supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure |
| 48 |
|
command if you want only one of them. |
| 49 |
|
|
| 50 |
|
2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is |
| 51 |
|
useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets |
| 52 |
|
relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so |
| 53 |
|
there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc. |
| 54 |
|
|
| 55 |
|
3. Upgrades to pcregrep: |
| 56 |
|
(i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep. |
| 57 |
|
(ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase. |
| 58 |
|
(iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories. |
| 59 |
|
(iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file. |
| 60 |
|
|
| 61 |
|
4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure |
| 62 |
|
script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix |
| 63 |
|
systems, the value can be set in config.h. |
| 64 |
|
|
| 65 |
|
5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an |
| 66 |
|
absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and |
| 67 |
|
likewise updated the man page. |
| 68 |
|
|
| 69 |
|
6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed. |
| 70 |
|
The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit. |
| 71 |
|
|
| 72 |
|
|
| 73 |
|
Release 3.3 01-Aug-00 |
| 74 |
|
--------------------- |
| 75 |
|
|
| 76 |
|
There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and |
| 77 |
|
experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented. |
| 78 |
|
Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release. |
| 79 |
|
|
| 80 |
|
|
| 81 |
|
Release 3.0 01-Feb-00 |
| 82 |
|
--------------------- |
| 83 |
|
|
| 84 |
|
1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It |
| 85 |
|
builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script. |
| 86 |
|
|
| 87 |
|
2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default. |
| 88 |
|
|
| 89 |
|
3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:]. |
| 90 |
|
|
| 91 |
|
5. There is an experimental recursion feature. |
| 92 |
|
|
| 93 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 94 |
IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00 |
IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00 |
Parent Directory
| 
Revision Log
| 
Patch