| 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 |
|
| 5 |
a Makefile and a config.h file. |
Release 7.2 30-Apr-07 |
| 6 |
|
--------------------- |
| 7 |
|
|
| 8 |
|
WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be |
| 9 |
|
recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K). |
| 10 |
|
|
| 11 |
|
Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is |
| 12 |
|
wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function |
| 13 |
|
independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the |
| 14 |
|
functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries |
| 15 |
|
are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the |
| 16 |
|
pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and |
| 17 |
|
the basic pcre library. |
| 18 |
|
|
| 19 |
|
Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added: |
| 20 |
|
|
| 21 |
|
(?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines. |
| 22 |
|
|
| 23 |
|
(Not sure if this one is actually in Perl 5.10) |
| 24 |
|
(?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions. |
| 25 |
|
|
| 26 |
|
\K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar |
| 27 |
|
matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string. |
| 28 |
|
|
| 29 |
|
(?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative |
| 30 |
|
start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing |
| 31 |
|
parentheses number 1 in both cases. |
| 32 |
|
|
| 33 |
|
\h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively. |
| 34 |
|
|
| 35 |
|
|
| 36 |
|
Release 7.1 24-Apr-07 |
| 37 |
|
--------------------- |
| 38 |
|
|
| 39 |
|
There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of |
| 40 |
|
PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which |
| 41 |
|
recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks. |
| 42 |
|
|
| 43 |
|
A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a |
| 44 |
|
complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools |
| 45 |
|
support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling |
| 46 |
|
PCRE in a wide variety of environments. |
| 47 |
|
|
| 48 |
|
NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built, |
| 49 |
|
called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was |
| 50 |
|
included in a single dll. |
| 51 |
|
|
| 52 |
|
Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer |
| 53 |
|
compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character |
| 54 |
|
tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate |
| 55 |
|
the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the |
| 56 |
|
"configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a |
| 57 |
|
system that uses EBCDIC code. |
| 58 |
|
|
| 59 |
|
There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is |
| 60 |
|
not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling. |
| 61 |
|
|
| 62 |
|
|
| 63 |
|
Release 7.0 19-Dec-06 |
| 64 |
|
--------------------- |
| 65 |
|
|
| 66 |
|
This release has a new major number because there have been some internal |
| 67 |
|
upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities, |
| 68 |
|
and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely |
| 69 |
|
to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance. |
| 70 |
|
Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If |
| 71 |
|
you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to |
| 72 |
|
re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are: |
| 73 |
|
|
| 74 |
|
1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds |
| 75 |
|
some more scripts. |
| 76 |
|
|
| 77 |
|
2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline |
| 78 |
|
sequence as a newline. |
| 79 |
|
|
| 80 |
|
3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit. |
| 81 |
|
|
| 82 |
|
4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include |
| 83 |
|
alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for |
| 84 |
|
recursion. |
| 85 |
|
|
| 86 |
|
5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a |
| 87 |
|
QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and |
| 88 |
|
assignment. |
| 89 |
|
|
| 90 |
|
For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. |
| 91 |
|
|
| 92 |
|
|
| 93 |
|
Release 6.7 04-Jul-06 |
| 94 |
|
--------------------- |
| 95 |
|
|
| 96 |
|
The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for |
| 97 |
|
multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the |
| 98 |
|
library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing). |
| 99 |
|
|
| 100 |
|
Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been |
| 101 |
|
significantly reduced for certain subject strings. |
| 102 |
|
|
| 103 |
|
|
| 104 |
|
Release 6.5 01-Feb-06 |
| 105 |
|
--------------------- |
| 106 |
|
|
| 107 |
|
Important changes in this release: |
| 108 |
|
|
| 109 |
|
1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep. |
| 110 |
|
|
| 111 |
|
2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the |
| 112 |
|
supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic", |
| 113 |
|
and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to |
| 114 |
|
the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that |
| 115 |
|
use \p or \P must be recompiled. |
| 116 |
|
|
| 117 |
|
3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all |
| 118 |
|
recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for |
| 119 |
|
example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because |
| 120 |
|
otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work. |
| 121 |
|
|
| 122 |
|
See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug |
| 123 |
|
fixes and tidies. |
| 124 |
|
|
| 125 |
|
|
| 126 |
|
Release 6.0 07-Jun-05 |
| 127 |
|
--------------------- |
| 128 |
|
|
| 129 |
|
The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several |
| 130 |
|
major new pieces of functionality. |
| 131 |
|
|
| 132 |
|
A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA |
| 133 |
|
algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases, |
| 134 |
|
though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On |
| 135 |
|
the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works |
| 136 |
|
better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the |
| 137 |
|
differences. |
| 138 |
|
|
| 139 |
|
The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new |
| 140 |
|
pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides. |
| 141 |
|
|
| 142 |
|
The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built |
| 143 |
|
automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this |
| 144 |
|
interface. |
| 145 |
|
|
| 146 |
|
The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each |
| 147 |
|
function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static |
| 148 |
|
linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have |
| 149 |
|
their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They |
| 150 |
|
are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers. |
| 151 |
|
|
| 152 |
|
The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as |
| 153 |
|
multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the |
| 154 |
|
ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility |
| 155 |
|
programs. |
| 156 |
|
|
| 157 |
|
|
| 158 |
|
Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 |
| 159 |
|
--------------------- |
| 160 |
|
|
| 161 |
|
The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more |
| 162 |
|
conventional "BSD" licence. |
| 163 |
|
|
| 164 |
|
In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes |
| 165 |
|
in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes |
| 166 |
|
are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The |
| 167 |
|
new features are: |
| 168 |
|
|
| 169 |
|
1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every |
| 170 |
|
item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position |
| 171 |
|
in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. |
| 172 |
|
|
| 173 |
|
2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character |
| 174 |
|
tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used |
| 175 |
|
at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the |
| 176 |
|
default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled |
| 177 |
|
pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything |
| 178 |
|
special unless you are using custom tables. |
| 179 |
|
|
| 180 |
|
3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to |
| 181 |
|
request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the |
| 182 |
|
subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing |
| 183 |
|
an input field as it is being typed. |
| 184 |
|
|
| 185 |
|
4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which |
| 186 |
|
means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only |
| 187 |
|
the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this |
| 188 |
|
support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the |
| 189 |
|
size of the library dramatically. |
| 190 |
|
|
| 191 |
|
5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. |
| 192 |
|
|
| 193 |
|
6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a |
| 194 |
|
different host with the opposite endianness. |
| 195 |
|
|
| 196 |
|
7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. |
| 197 |
|
|
| 198 |
|
The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no |
| 199 |
|
longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This |
| 200 |
|
makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching |
| 201 |
|
possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a |
| 202 |
|
result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. |
| 203 |
|
|
| 204 |
|
|
| 205 |
|
Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 |
| 206 |
|
--------------------- |
| 207 |
|
|
| 208 |
|
Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features: |
| 209 |
|
|
| 210 |
|
1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive |
| 211 |
|
function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows |
| 212 |
|
things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks. |
| 213 |
|
|
| 214 |
|
2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to |
| 215 |
|
check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the |
| 216 |
|
latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET. |
| 217 |
|
|
| 218 |
|
3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code. |
| 219 |
|
|
| 220 |
|
|
| 221 |
|
Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 |
| 222 |
|
--------------------- |
| 223 |
|
|
| 224 |
|
This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE |
| 225 |
|
checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress |
| 226 |
|
this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance. |
| 227 |
|
|
| 228 |
|
|
| 229 |
|
Releases 4.1 - 4.3 |
| 230 |
|
------------------ |
| 231 |
|
|
| 232 |
|
Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a |
| 233 |
|
look at ChangeLog. |
| 234 |
|
|
| 235 |
|
|
| 236 |
|
Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 |
| 237 |
|
--------------------- |
| 238 |
|
|
| 239 |
|
There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional |
| 240 |
|
functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new |
| 241 |
|
functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the |
| 242 |
|
documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. |
| 243 |
|
|
| 244 |
|
1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. |
| 245 |
|
|
| 246 |
|
2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java |
| 247 |
|
package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic |
| 248 |
|
grouping". |
| 249 |
|
|
| 250 |
|
3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position |
| 251 |
|
is at the start point of the match. |
| 252 |
|
|
| 253 |
|
4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides |
| 254 |
|
with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE |
| 255 |
|
is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to |
| 256 |
|
its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at |
| 257 |
|
appropriate points. |
| 258 |
|
|
| 259 |
|
5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really |
| 260 |
|
easy to get totally confused. |
| 261 |
|
|
| 262 |
|
6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to |
| 263 |
|
name a group. |
| 264 |
|
|
| 265 |
|
7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an |
| 266 |
|
option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. |
| 267 |
|
|
| 268 |
|
8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. |
| 269 |
|
These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate |
| 270 |
|
directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking |
| 271 |
|
between the pages has been installed. |
| 272 |
|
|
| 273 |
|
|
| 274 |
|
Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 |
| 275 |
|
--------------------- |
| 276 |
|
|
| 277 |
|
1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf |
| 278 |
|
and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS |
| 279 |
|
supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure |
| 280 |
|
command if you want only one of them. |
| 281 |
|
|
| 282 |
|
2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is |
| 283 |
|
useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets |
| 284 |
|
relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so |
| 285 |
|
there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc. |
| 286 |
|
|
| 287 |
|
3. Upgrades to pcregrep: |
| 288 |
|
(i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep. |
| 289 |
|
(ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase. |
| 290 |
|
(iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories. |
| 291 |
|
(iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file. |
| 292 |
|
|
| 293 |
|
4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure |
| 294 |
|
script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix |
| 295 |
|
systems, the value can be set in config.h. |
| 296 |
|
|
| 297 |
|
5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an |
| 298 |
|
absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and |
| 299 |
|
likewise updated the man page. |
| 300 |
|
|
| 301 |
|
6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed. |
| 302 |
|
The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit. |
| 303 |
|
|
| 304 |
|
|
| 305 |
|
Release 3.3 01-Aug-00 |
| 306 |
|
--------------------- |
| 307 |
|
|
| 308 |
|
There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and |
| 309 |
|
experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented. |
| 310 |
|
Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release. |
| 311 |
|
|
| 312 |
|
|
| 313 |
|
Release 3.0 01-Feb-00 |
| 314 |
|
--------------------- |
| 315 |
|
|
| 316 |
|
1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It |
| 317 |
|
builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script. |
| 318 |
|
|
| 319 |
|
2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default. |
| 320 |
|
|
| 321 |
|
3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:]. |
| 322 |
|
|
| 323 |
|
5. There is an experimental recursion feature. |
| 324 |
|
|
| 325 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 326 |
IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00 |
IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00 |
Parent Directory
| 
Revision Log
| 
Patch