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News about PCRE releases |
News about PCRE releases |
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Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 |
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This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE |
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checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress |
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this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance. |
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Releases 4.1 - 4.3 |
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Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a |
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look at ChangeLog. |
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Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 |
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There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional |
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functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new |
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functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the |
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documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. |
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1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. |
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2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java |
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package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic |
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grouping". |
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3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position |
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is at the start point of the match. |
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4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides |
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with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE |
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is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to |
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its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at |
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appropriate points. |
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5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really |
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easy to get totally confused. |
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6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to |
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name a group. |
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7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an |
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option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. |
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8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. |
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These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate |
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directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking |
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between the pages has been installed. |
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Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 |
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1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf |
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and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS |
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supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure |
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command if you want only one of them. |
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2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is |
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useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets |
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relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so |
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there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc. |
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3. Upgrades to pcregrep: |
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(i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep. |
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(ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase. |
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(iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories. |
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(iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file. |
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4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure |
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script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix |
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systems, the value can be set in config.h. |
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5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an |
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absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and |
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likewise updated the man page. |
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6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed. |
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The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit. |
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Release 3.3 01-Aug-00 |
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There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and |
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experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented. |
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Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release. |
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Release 3.0 01-Feb-00 |
Release 3.0 01-Feb-00 |
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