News about PCRE releases
------------------------
Release 5.0 13-Sep-04
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The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more
conventional "BSD" licence.
In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes
in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes
are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The
new features are:
1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every
item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position
in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing.
2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character
tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used
at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the
default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled
pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything
special unless you are using custom tables.
3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to
request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the
subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing
an input field as it is being typed.
4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which
means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only
the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this
support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the
size of the library dramatically.
5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later.
6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a
different host with the opposite endianness.
7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features.
The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no
longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This
makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching
possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a
result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected.
Release 4.5 01-Dec-03
---------------------
Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features:
1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive
function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows
things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks.
2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to
check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the
latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET.
3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code.
Release 4.4 21-Aug-03
---------------------
This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE
checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress
this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance.
Releases 4.1 - 4.3
------------------
Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a
look at ChangeLog.
Release 4.0 17-Feb-03
---------------------
There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional
functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new
functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the
documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes.
2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java
package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic
grouping".
3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position
is at the start point of the match.
4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides
with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE
is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to
its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at
appropriate points.
5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really
easy to get totally confused.
6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to
name a group.
7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an
option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode.
8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages.
These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate
directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking
between the pages has been installed.
Release 3.5 15-Aug-01
---------------------
1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf
and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS
supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure
command if you want only one of them.
2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is
useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets
relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so
there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc.
3. Upgrades to pcregrep:
(i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep.
(ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase.
(iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories.
(iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file.
4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure
script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix
systems, the value can be set in config.h.
5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an
absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and
likewise updated the man page.
6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed.
The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit.
Release 3.3 01-Aug-00
---------------------
There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and
experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented.
Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release.
Release 3.0 01-Feb-00
---------------------
1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It
builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script.
2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default.
3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:].
5. There is an experimental recursion feature.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00
Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger
ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace.
The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support
some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005.
IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00
Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the
pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it
possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current
locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new arguement
should be passed as NULL.
IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05
Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made
to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been
added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the
subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man
page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all
you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a
value of zero. For example, change
pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize)
to
pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize)
****