1 |
News about PCRE releases
|
2 |
------------------------
|
3 |
|
4 |
Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is now being maintained for bug fixes
|
5 |
only. New projects are advised to use the new PCRE2 libraries.
|
6 |
|
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|
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Release 8.44 12-February-2020
|
9 |
-----------------------------
|
10 |
|
11 |
This is a bug-fix release.
|
12 |
|
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Release 8.43 23-February-2019
|
15 |
-----------------------------
|
16 |
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17 |
This is a bug-fix release.
|
18 |
|
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Release 8.42 20-March-2018
|
21 |
--------------------------
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This is a bug-fix release.
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24 |
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Release 8.41 13-June-2017
|
27 |
-------------------------
|
28 |
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This is a bug-fix release.
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30 |
|
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Release 8.40 11-January-2017
|
33 |
----------------------------
|
34 |
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35 |
This is a bug-fix release.
|
36 |
|
37 |
|
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Release 8.39 14-June-2016
|
39 |
-------------------------
|
40 |
|
41 |
Some appropriate PCRE2 JIT improvements have been retro-fitted to PCRE1. Apart
|
42 |
from that, this is another bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called
|
43 |
PCRE1) is now being maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to
|
44 |
use the new PCRE2 libraries.
|
45 |
|
46 |
|
47 |
Release 8.38 23-November-2015
|
48 |
-----------------------------
|
49 |
|
50 |
This is bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is now being
|
51 |
maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to use the new PCRE2
|
52 |
libraries.
|
53 |
|
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|
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Release 8.37 28-April-2015
|
56 |
--------------------------
|
57 |
|
58 |
This is bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is now being
|
59 |
maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to use the new PCRE2
|
60 |
libraries.
|
61 |
|
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|
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Release 8.36 26-September-2014
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64 |
------------------------------
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65 |
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66 |
This is primarily a bug-fix release. However, in addition, the Unicode data
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67 |
tables have been updated to Unicode 7.0.0.
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68 |
|
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|
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Release 8.35 04-April-2014
|
71 |
--------------------------
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73 |
There have been performance improvements for classes containing non-ASCII
|
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characters and the "auto-possessification" feature has been extended. Other
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minor improvements have been implemented and bugs fixed. There is a new callout
|
76 |
feature to enable applications to do detailed stack checks at compile time, to
|
77 |
avoid running out of stack for deeply nested parentheses. The JIT compiler has
|
78 |
been extended with experimental support for ARM-64, MIPS-64, and PPC-LE.
|
79 |
|
80 |
|
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Release 8.34 15-December-2013
|
82 |
-----------------------------
|
83 |
|
84 |
As well as fixing the inevitable bugs, performance has been improved by
|
85 |
refactoring and extending the amount of "auto-possessification" that PCRE does.
|
86 |
Other notable changes:
|
87 |
|
88 |
. Implemented PCRE_INFO_MATCH_EMPTY, which yields 1 if the pattern can match
|
89 |
an empty string. If it can, pcretest shows this in its information output.
|
90 |
|
91 |
. A back reference to a named subpattern when there is more than one of the
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92 |
same name now checks them in the order in which they appear in the pattern.
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93 |
The first one that is set is used for the reference. Previously only the
|
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first one was inspected. This change makes PCRE more compatible with Perl.
|
95 |
|
96 |
. Unicode character properties were updated from Unicode 6.3.0.
|
97 |
|
98 |
. The character VT has been added to the set of characters that match \s and
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99 |
are generally treated as white space, following this same change in Perl
|
100 |
5.18. There is now no difference between "Perl space" and "POSIX space".
|
101 |
|
102 |
. Perl has changed its handling of \8 and \9. If there is no previously
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103 |
encountered capturing group of those numbers, they are treated as the
|
104 |
literal characters 8 and 9 instead of a binary zero followed by the
|
105 |
literals. PCRE now does the same.
|
106 |
|
107 |
. Following Perl, added \o{} to specify codepoints in octal, making it
|
108 |
possible to specify values greater than 0777 and also making them
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unambiguous.
|
110 |
|
111 |
. In UCP mode, \s was not matching two of the characters that Perl matches,
|
112 |
namely NEL (U+0085) and MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR (U+180E), though they
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113 |
were matched by \h.
|
114 |
|
115 |
. Add JIT support for the 64 bit TileGX architecture.
|
116 |
|
117 |
. Upgraded the handling of the POSIX classes [:graph:], [:print:], and
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118 |
[:punct:] when PCRE_UCP is set so as to include the same characters as Perl
|
119 |
does in Unicode mode.
|
120 |
|
121 |
. Perl no longer allows group names to start with digits, so I have made this
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122 |
change also in PCRE.
|
123 |
|
124 |
. Added support for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] as used in the BSD POSIX library to
|
125 |
mean "start of word" and "end of word", respectively, as a transition aid.
|
126 |
|
127 |
|
128 |
Release 8.33 28-May-2013
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129 |
--------------------------
|
130 |
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131 |
A number of bugs are fixed, and some performance improvements have been made.
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132 |
There are also some new features, of which these are the most important:
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133 |
|
134 |
. The behaviour of the backtracking verbs has been rationalized and
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135 |
documented in more detail.
|
136 |
|
137 |
. JIT now supports callouts and all of the backtracking verbs.
|
138 |
|
139 |
. Unicode validation has been updated in the light of Unicode Corrigendum #9,
|
140 |
which points out that "non characters" are not "characters that may not
|
141 |
appear in Unicode strings" but rather "characters that are reserved for
|
142 |
internal use and have only local meaning".
|
143 |
|
144 |
. (*LIMIT_MATCH=d) and (*LIMIT_RECURSION=d) have been added so that the
|
145 |
creator of a pattern can specify lower (but not higher) limits for the
|
146 |
matching process.
|
147 |
|
148 |
. The PCRE_NEVER_UTF option is available to prevent pattern-writers from using
|
149 |
the (*UTF) feature, as this could be a security issue.
|
150 |
|
151 |
|
152 |
Release 8.32 30-November-2012
|
153 |
-----------------------------
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154 |
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155 |
This release fixes a number of bugs, but also has some new features. These are
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156 |
the highlights:
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157 |
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158 |
. There is now support for 32-bit character strings and UTF-32. Like the
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159 |
16-bit support, this is done by compiling a separate 32-bit library.
|
160 |
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161 |
. \X now matches a Unicode extended grapheme cluster.
|
162 |
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163 |
. Case-independent matching of Unicode characters that have more than one
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164 |
"other case" now makes all three (or more) characters equivalent. This
|
165 |
applies, for example, to Greek Sigma, which has two lowercase versions.
|
166 |
|
167 |
. Unicode character properties are updated to Unicode 6.2.0.
|
168 |
|
169 |
. The EBCDIC support, which had decayed, has had a spring clean.
|
170 |
|
171 |
. A number of JIT optimizations have been added, which give faster JIT
|
172 |
execution speed. In addition, a new direct interface to JIT execution is
|
173 |
available. This bypasses some of the sanity checks of pcre_exec() to give a
|
174 |
noticeable speed-up.
|
175 |
|
176 |
. A number of issues in pcregrep have been fixed, making it more compatible
|
177 |
with GNU grep. In particular, --exclude and --include (and variants) apply
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178 |
to all files now, not just those obtained from scanning a directory
|
179 |
recursively. In Windows environments, the default action for directories is
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180 |
now "skip" instead of "read" (which provokes an error).
|
181 |
|
182 |
. If the --only-matching (-o) option in pcregrep is specified multiple
|
183 |
times, each one causes appropriate output. For example, -o1 -o2 outputs the
|
184 |
substrings matched by the 1st and 2nd capturing parentheses. A separating
|
185 |
string can be specified by --om-separator (default empty).
|
186 |
|
187 |
. When PCRE is built via Autotools using a version of gcc that has the
|
188 |
"visibility" feature, it is used to hide internal library functions that are
|
189 |
not part of the public API.
|
190 |
|
191 |
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192 |
Release 8.31 06-July-2012
|
193 |
-------------------------
|
194 |
|
195 |
This is mainly a bug-fixing release, with a small number of developments:
|
196 |
|
197 |
. The JIT compiler now supports partial matching and the (*MARK) and
|
198 |
(*COMMIT) verbs.
|
199 |
|
200 |
. PCRE_INFO_MAXLOOKBEHIND can be used to find the longest lookbehind in a
|
201 |
pattern.
|
202 |
|
203 |
. There should be a performance improvement when using the heap instead of the
|
204 |
stack for recursion.
|
205 |
|
206 |
. pcregrep can now be linked with libedit as an alternative to libreadline.
|
207 |
|
208 |
. pcregrep now has a --file-list option where the list of files to scan is
|
209 |
given as a file.
|
210 |
|
211 |
. pcregrep now recognizes binary files and there are related options.
|
212 |
|
213 |
. The Unicode tables have been updated to 6.1.0.
|
214 |
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215 |
As always, the full list of changes is in the ChangeLog file.
|
216 |
|
217 |
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218 |
Release 8.30 04-February-2012
|
219 |
-----------------------------
|
220 |
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221 |
Release 8.30 introduces a major new feature: support for 16-bit character
|
222 |
strings, compiled as a separate library. There are a few changes to the
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223 |
8-bit library, in addition to some bug fixes.
|
224 |
|
225 |
. The pcre_info() function, which has been obsolete for over 10 years, has
|
226 |
been removed.
|
227 |
|
228 |
. When a compiled pattern was saved to a file and later reloaded on a host
|
229 |
with different endianness, PCRE used automatically to swap the bytes in some
|
230 |
of the data fields. With the advent of the 16-bit library, where more of this
|
231 |
swapping is needed, it is no longer done automatically. Instead, the bad
|
232 |
endianness is detected and a specific error is given. The user can then call
|
233 |
a new function called pcre_pattern_to_host_byte_order() (or an equivalent
|
234 |
16-bit function) to do the swap.
|
235 |
|
236 |
. In UTF-8 mode, the values 0xd800 to 0xdfff are not legal Unicode
|
237 |
code points and are now faulted. (They are the so-called "surrogates"
|
238 |
that are reserved for coding high values in UTF-16.)
|
239 |
|
240 |
|
241 |
Release 8.21 12-Dec-2011
|
242 |
------------------------
|
243 |
|
244 |
This is almost entirely a bug-fix release. The only new feature is the ability
|
245 |
to obtain the size of the memory used by the JIT compiler.
|
246 |
|
247 |
|
248 |
Release 8.20 21-Oct-2011
|
249 |
------------------------
|
250 |
|
251 |
The main change in this release is the inclusion of Zoltan Herczeg's
|
252 |
just-in-time compiler support, which can be accessed by building PCRE with
|
253 |
--enable-jit. Large performance benefits can be had in many situations. 8.20
|
254 |
also fixes an unfortunate bug that was introduced in 8.13 as well as tidying up
|
255 |
a number of infelicities and differences from Perl.
|
256 |
|
257 |
|
258 |
Release 8.13 16-Aug-2011
|
259 |
------------------------
|
260 |
|
261 |
This is mainly a bug-fix release. There has been a lot of internal refactoring.
|
262 |
The Unicode tables have been updated. The only new feature in the library is
|
263 |
the passing of *MARK information to callouts. Some additions have been made to
|
264 |
pcretest to make testing easier and more comprehensive. There is a new option
|
265 |
for pcregrep to adjust its internal buffer size.
|
266 |
|
267 |
|
268 |
Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011
|
269 |
------------------------
|
270 |
|
271 |
This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail
|
272 |
on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library.
|
273 |
|
274 |
|
275 |
Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010
|
276 |
------------------------
|
277 |
|
278 |
A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see
|
279 |
ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes:
|
280 |
|
281 |
. Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep.
|
282 |
|
283 |
. Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options
|
284 |
of pcregrep.
|
285 |
|
286 |
. Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and
|
287 |
\B.
|
288 |
|
289 |
. Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a
|
290 |
bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD.
|
291 |
|
292 |
. Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_
|
293 |
START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time
|
294 |
|
295 |
|
296 |
Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010
|
297 |
------------------------
|
298 |
|
299 |
There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option
|
300 |
PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their
|
301 |
opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number
|
302 |
of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option,
|
303 |
--line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to
|
304 |
pipes.
|
305 |
|
306 |
|
307 |
Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010
|
308 |
------------------------
|
309 |
|
310 |
Another bug-fix release.
|
311 |
|
312 |
|
313 |
Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010
|
314 |
------------------------
|
315 |
|
316 |
This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and
|
317 |
infelicities in the build system have been fixed.
|
318 |
|
319 |
|
320 |
Release 8.00 19-Oct-09
|
321 |
----------------------
|
322 |
|
323 |
Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some
|
324 |
enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been
|
325 |
removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching
|
326 |
process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a
|
327 |
full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a
|
328 |
lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have
|
329 |
duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have
|
330 |
different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes.
|
331 |
The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate
|
332 |
of change is not slowing down.
|
333 |
|
334 |
|
335 |
Release 7.9 11-Apr-09
|
336 |
---------------------
|
337 |
|
338 |
Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions.
|
339 |
|
340 |
|
341 |
Release 7.8 05-Sep-08
|
342 |
---------------------
|
343 |
|
344 |
More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property
|
345 |
lookup.
|
346 |
|
347 |
|
348 |
Release 7.7 07-May-08
|
349 |
---------------------
|
350 |
|
351 |
This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new
|
352 |
features.
|
353 |
|
354 |
|
355 |
Release 7.6 28-Jan-08
|
356 |
---------------------
|
357 |
|
358 |
The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a
|
359 |
potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In
|
360 |
addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date.
|
361 |
|
362 |
|
363 |
Release 7.5 10-Jan-08
|
364 |
---------------------
|
365 |
|
366 |
This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with
|
367 |
libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been
|
368 |
added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to
|
369 |
pcregrep.
|
370 |
|
371 |
|
372 |
Release 7.4 21-Sep-07
|
373 |
---------------------
|
374 |
|
375 |
The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether
|
376 |
\R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF.
|
377 |
Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of
|
378 |
relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation
|
379 |
updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE
|
380 |
has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file.
|
381 |
|
382 |
|
383 |
Release 7.3 28-Aug-07
|
384 |
---------------------
|
385 |
|
386 |
Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not:
|
387 |
|
388 |
1. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control
|
389 |
verbs" such as (*PRUNE).
|
390 |
|
391 |
2. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more
|
392 |
restrictive in the strings it accepts.
|
393 |
|
394 |
3. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a
|
395 |
consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that
|
396 |
has a limited repeat count.
|
397 |
|
398 |
4. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec()
|
399 |
no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match
|
400 |
fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern.
|
401 |
This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred.
|
402 |
|
403 |
5. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of
|
404 |
a pattern have been added.
|
405 |
|
406 |
|
407 |
Release 7.2 19-Jun-07
|
408 |
---------------------
|
409 |
|
410 |
WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be
|
411 |
recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v,
|
412 |
and \V).
|
413 |
|
414 |
Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is
|
415 |
wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function
|
416 |
independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the
|
417 |
functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries
|
418 |
are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the
|
419 |
pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and
|
420 |
the basic pcre library.
|
421 |
|
422 |
Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added:
|
423 |
|
424 |
(?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines.
|
425 |
|
426 |
(?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions.
|
427 |
|
428 |
\k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>.
|
429 |
|
430 |
\K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar
|
431 |
matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string.
|
432 |
|
433 |
(?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative
|
434 |
start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing
|
435 |
parentheses number 1 in both cases.
|
436 |
|
437 |
\h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively.
|
438 |
|
439 |
|
440 |
Release 7.1 24-Apr-07
|
441 |
---------------------
|
442 |
|
443 |
There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of
|
444 |
PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which
|
445 |
recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks.
|
446 |
|
447 |
A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a
|
448 |
complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools
|
449 |
support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling
|
450 |
PCRE in a wide variety of environments.
|
451 |
|
452 |
NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built,
|
453 |
called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was
|
454 |
included in a single dll.
|
455 |
|
456 |
Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer
|
457 |
compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character
|
458 |
tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate
|
459 |
the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the
|
460 |
"configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a
|
461 |
system that uses EBCDIC code.
|
462 |
|
463 |
There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is
|
464 |
not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling.
|
465 |
|
466 |
|
467 |
Release 7.0 19-Dec-06
|
468 |
---------------------
|
469 |
|
470 |
This release has a new major number because there have been some internal
|
471 |
upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities,
|
472 |
and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely
|
473 |
to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance.
|
474 |
Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If
|
475 |
you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to
|
476 |
re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are:
|
477 |
|
478 |
1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds
|
479 |
some more scripts.
|
480 |
|
481 |
2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline
|
482 |
sequence as a newline.
|
483 |
|
484 |
3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit.
|
485 |
|
486 |
4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include
|
487 |
alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for
|
488 |
recursion.
|
489 |
|
490 |
5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a
|
491 |
QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and
|
492 |
assignment.
|
493 |
|
494 |
For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
|
495 |
|
496 |
|
497 |
Release 6.7 04-Jul-06
|
498 |
---------------------
|
499 |
|
500 |
The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for
|
501 |
multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the
|
502 |
library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing).
|
503 |
|
504 |
Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been
|
505 |
significantly reduced for certain subject strings.
|
506 |
|
507 |
|
508 |
Release 6.5 01-Feb-06
|
509 |
---------------------
|
510 |
|
511 |
Important changes in this release:
|
512 |
|
513 |
1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep.
|
514 |
|
515 |
2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the
|
516 |
supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic",
|
517 |
and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to
|
518 |
the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that
|
519 |
use \p or \P must be recompiled.
|
520 |
|
521 |
3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all
|
522 |
recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for
|
523 |
example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because
|
524 |
otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work.
|
525 |
|
526 |
See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug
|
527 |
fixes and tidies.
|
528 |
|
529 |
|
530 |
Release 6.0 07-Jun-05
|
531 |
---------------------
|
532 |
|
533 |
The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several
|
534 |
major new pieces of functionality.
|
535 |
|
536 |
A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA
|
537 |
algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases,
|
538 |
though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On
|
539 |
the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works
|
540 |
better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the
|
541 |
differences.
|
542 |
|
543 |
The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new
|
544 |
pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides.
|
545 |
|
546 |
The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built
|
547 |
automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this
|
548 |
interface.
|
549 |
|
550 |
The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each
|
551 |
function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static
|
552 |
linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have
|
553 |
their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They
|
554 |
are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers.
|
555 |
|
556 |
The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as
|
557 |
multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the
|
558 |
ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility
|
559 |
programs.
|
560 |
|
561 |
|
562 |
Release 5.0 13-Sep-04
|
563 |
---------------------
|
564 |
|
565 |
The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more
|
566 |
conventional "BSD" licence.
|
567 |
|
568 |
In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes
|
569 |
in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes
|
570 |
are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The
|
571 |
new features are:
|
572 |
|
573 |
1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every
|
574 |
item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position
|
575 |
in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing.
|
576 |
|
577 |
2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character
|
578 |
tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used
|
579 |
at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the
|
580 |
default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled
|
581 |
pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything
|
582 |
special unless you are using custom tables.
|
583 |
|
584 |
3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to
|
585 |
request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the
|
586 |
subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing
|
587 |
an input field as it is being typed.
|
588 |
|
589 |
4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which
|
590 |
means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only
|
591 |
the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this
|
592 |
support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the
|
593 |
size of the library dramatically.
|
594 |
|
595 |
5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later.
|
596 |
|
597 |
6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a
|
598 |
different host with the opposite endianness.
|
599 |
|
600 |
7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features.
|
601 |
|
602 |
The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no
|
603 |
longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This
|
604 |
makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching
|
605 |
possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a
|
606 |
result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected.
|
607 |
|
608 |
|
609 |
Release 4.5 01-Dec-03
|
610 |
---------------------
|
611 |
|
612 |
Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features:
|
613 |
|
614 |
1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive
|
615 |
function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows
|
616 |
things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks.
|
617 |
|
618 |
2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to
|
619 |
check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the
|
620 |
latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET.
|
621 |
|
622 |
3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code.
|
623 |
|
624 |
|
625 |
Release 4.4 21-Aug-03
|
626 |
---------------------
|
627 |
|
628 |
This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE
|
629 |
checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress
|
630 |
this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance.
|
631 |
|
632 |
|
633 |
Releases 4.1 - 4.3
|
634 |
------------------
|
635 |
|
636 |
Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a
|
637 |
look at ChangeLog.
|
638 |
|
639 |
|
640 |
Release 4.0 17-Feb-03
|
641 |
---------------------
|
642 |
|
643 |
There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional
|
644 |
functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new
|
645 |
functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the
|
646 |
documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
|
647 |
|
648 |
1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes.
|
649 |
|
650 |
2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java
|
651 |
package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic
|
652 |
grouping".
|
653 |
|
654 |
3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position
|
655 |
is at the start point of the match.
|
656 |
|
657 |
4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides
|
658 |
with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE
|
659 |
is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to
|
660 |
its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at
|
661 |
appropriate points.
|
662 |
|
663 |
5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really
|
664 |
easy to get totally confused.
|
665 |
|
666 |
6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to
|
667 |
name a group.
|
668 |
|
669 |
7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an
|
670 |
option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode.
|
671 |
|
672 |
8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages.
|
673 |
These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate
|
674 |
directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking
|
675 |
between the pages has been installed.
|
676 |
|
677 |
|
678 |
Release 3.5 15-Aug-01
|
679 |
---------------------
|
680 |
|
681 |
1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf
|
682 |
and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS
|
683 |
supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure
|
684 |
command if you want only one of them.
|
685 |
|
686 |
2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is
|
687 |
useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets
|
688 |
relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so
|
689 |
there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc.
|
690 |
|
691 |
3. Upgrades to pcregrep:
|
692 |
(i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep.
|
693 |
(ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase.
|
694 |
(iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories.
|
695 |
(iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file.
|
696 |
|
697 |
4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure
|
698 |
script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix
|
699 |
systems, the value can be set in config.h.
|
700 |
|
701 |
5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an
|
702 |
absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and
|
703 |
likewise updated the man page.
|
704 |
|
705 |
6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed.
|
706 |
The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit.
|
707 |
|
708 |
|
709 |
Release 3.3 01-Aug-00
|
710 |
---------------------
|
711 |
|
712 |
There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and
|
713 |
experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented.
|
714 |
Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release.
|
715 |
|
716 |
|
717 |
Release 3.0 01-Feb-00
|
718 |
---------------------
|
719 |
|
720 |
1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It
|
721 |
builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script.
|
722 |
|
723 |
2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default.
|
724 |
|
725 |
3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:].
|
726 |
|
727 |
5. There is an experimental recursion feature.
|
728 |
|
729 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
730 |
IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00
|
731 |
|
732 |
Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger
|
733 |
ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace.
|
734 |
The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support
|
735 |
some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005.
|
736 |
|
737 |
IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00
|
738 |
|
739 |
Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the
|
740 |
pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it
|
741 |
possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current
|
742 |
locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new argument
|
743 |
should be passed as NULL.
|
744 |
|
745 |
IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05
|
746 |
|
747 |
Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made
|
748 |
to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been
|
749 |
added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the
|
750 |
subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man
|
751 |
page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all
|
752 |
you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a
|
753 |
value of zero. For example, change
|
754 |
|
755 |
pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize)
|
756 |
to
|
757 |
pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize)
|
758 |
|
759 |
****
|