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revision 41 by nigel, Sat Feb 24 21:39:17 2007 UTC revision 73 by nigel, Sat Feb 24 21:40:30 2007 UTC
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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 4.5 01-Dec-03
5  a Makefile and a config.h file.  ---------------------
6    
7    Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features:
8    
9    1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive
10    function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows
11    things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks.
12    
13    2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to
14    check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the
15    latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET.
16    
17    3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code.
18    
19    
20    Release 4.4 21-Aug-03
21    ---------------------
22    
23    This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE
24    checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress
25    this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance.
26    
27    
28    Releases 4.1 - 4.3
29    ------------------
30    
31    Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a
32    look at ChangeLog.
33    
34    
35    Release 4.0 17-Feb-03
36    ---------------------
37    
38    There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional
39    functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new
40    functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the
41    documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
42    
43    1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes.
44    
45    2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java
46    package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic
47    grouping".
48    
49    3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position
50    is at the start point of the match.
51    
52    4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides
53    with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE
54    is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to
55    its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at
56    appropriate points.
57    
58    5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really
59    easy to get totally confused.
60    
61    6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to
62    name a group.
63    
64    7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an
65    option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode.
66    
67    8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages.
68    These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate
69    directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking
70    between the pages has been installed.
71    
72    
73    Release 3.5 15-Aug-01
74    ---------------------
75    
76    1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf
77    and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS
78    supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure
79    command if you want only one of them.
80    
81    2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is
82    useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets
83    relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so
84    there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc.
85    
86    3. Upgrades to pcregrep:
87       (i)   Added long-form option names like gnu grep.
88       (ii)  Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase.
89       (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories.
90       (iv)  Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file.
91    
92    4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure
93    script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix
94    systems, the value can be set in config.h.
95    
96    5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an
97    absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and
98    likewise updated the man page.
99    
100    6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed.
101    The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit.
102    
103    
104    Release 3.3 01-Aug-00
105    ---------------------
106    
107    There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and
108    experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented.
109    Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release.
110    
111    
112    Release 3.0 01-Feb-00
113    ---------------------
114    
115    1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It
116    builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script.
117    
118    2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default.
119    
120    3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:].
121    
122    5. There is an experimental recursion feature.
123    
124  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
125            IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00            IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00
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