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The perltest program
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--------------------
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The perltest.pl script tests Perl's regular expressions; it has the same
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specification as pcretest, and so can be given identical input, except that
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input patterns can be followed only by Perl's lower case modifiers and /+ (as
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used by pcretest), which is recognized and handled by the program.
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The data lines are processed as Perl double-quoted strings, so if they contain
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" $ or @ characters, these have to be escaped. For this reason, all such
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characters in testinput1 and testinput4 are escaped so that they can be used
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for perltest as well as for pcretest. The special upper case pattern
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modifiers such as /A that pcretest recognizes, and its special data line
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escapes, are not used in these files. The output should be identical, apart
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from the initial identifying banner.
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The perltest.pl script can also test UTF-8 features. It recognizes the special
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modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke UTF-8 functionality. The testinput4
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file can be fed to perltest to run compatible UTF-8 tests.
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The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest.pl, since
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they make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that pcretest
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uses to test some features of PCRE. Some of these files also contains malformed
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regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses them correctly.
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Philip Hazel
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September 2009
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