1 News about PCRE releases 2 ------------------------ 3 4 Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011 5 ------------------------ 6 7 This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail 8 on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library. 9 10 11 Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010 12 ------------------------ 13 14 A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see 15 ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes: 16 17 . Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep. 18 19 . Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options 20 of pcregrep. 21 22 . Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and 23 \B. 24 25 . Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a 26 bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD. 27 28 . Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_ 29 START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time 30 31 32 Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010 33 ------------------------ 34 35 There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option 36 PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their 37 opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number 38 of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option, 39 --line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to 40 pipes. 41 42 43 Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010 44 ------------------------ 45 46 Another bug-fix release. 47 48 49 Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010 50 ------------------------ 51 52 This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and 53 infelicities in the build system have been fixed. 54 55 56 Release 8.00 19-Oct-09 57 ---------------------- 58 59 Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some 60 enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been 61 removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching 62 process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a 63 full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a 64 lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have 65 duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have 66 different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes. 67 The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate 68 of change is not slowing down. 69 70 71 Release 7.9 11-Apr-09 72 --------------------- 73 74 Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions. 75 76 77 Release 7.8 05-Sep-08 78 --------------------- 79 80 More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property 81 lookup. 82 83 84 Release 7.7 07-May-08 85 --------------------- 86 87 This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new 88 features. 89 90 91 Release 7.6 28-Jan-08 92 --------------------- 93 94 The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a 95 potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In 96 addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date. 97 98 99 Release 7.5 10-Jan-08 100 --------------------- 101 102 This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with 103 libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been 104 added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to 105 pcregrep. 106 107 108 Release 7.4 21-Sep-07 109 --------------------- 110 111 The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether 112 \R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF. 113 Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of 114 relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation 115 updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE 116 has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file. 117 118 119 Release 7.3 28-Aug-07 120 --------------------- 121 122 Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not: 123 124 1. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control 125 verbs" such as (*PRUNE). 126 127 2. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more 128 restrictive in the strings it accepts. 129 130 3. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a 131 consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that 132 has a limited repeat count. 133 134 4. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec() 135 no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match 136 fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern. 137 This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred. 138 139 5. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of 140 a pattern have been added. 141 142 143 Release 7.2 19-Jun-07 144 --------------------- 145 146 WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be 147 recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v, 148 and \V). 149 150 Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is 151 wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function 152 independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the 153 functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries 154 are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the 155 pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and 156 the basic pcre library. 157 158 Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added: 159 160 (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines. 161 162 (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions. 163 164 \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>. 165 166 \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar 167 matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string. 168 169 (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative 170 start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing 171 parentheses number 1 in both cases. 172 173 \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively. 174 175 176 Release 7.1 24-Apr-07 177 --------------------- 178 179 There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of 180 PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which 181 recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks. 182 183 A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a 184 complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools 185 support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling 186 PCRE in a wide variety of environments. 187 188 NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built, 189 called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was 190 included in a single dll. 191 192 Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer 193 compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character 194 tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate 195 the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the 196 "configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a 197 system that uses EBCDIC code. 198 199 There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is 200 not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling. 201 202 203 Release 7.0 19-Dec-06 204 --------------------- 205 206 This release has a new major number because there have been some internal 207 upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities, 208 and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely 209 to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance. 210 Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If 211 you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to 212 re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are: 213 214 1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds 215 some more scripts. 216 217 2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline 218 sequence as a newline. 219 220 3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit. 221 222 4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include 223 alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for 224 recursion. 225 226 5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a 227 QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and 228 assignment. 229 230 For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. 231 232 233 Release 6.7 04-Jul-06 234 --------------------- 235 236 The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for 237 multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the 238 library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing). 239 240 Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been 241 significantly reduced for certain subject strings. 242 243 244 Release 6.5 01-Feb-06 245 --------------------- 246 247 Important changes in this release: 248 249 1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep. 250 251 2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the 252 supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic", 253 and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to 254 the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that 255 use \p or \P must be recompiled. 256 257 3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all 258 recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for 259 example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because 260 otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work. 261 262 See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug 263 fixes and tidies. 264 265 266 Release 6.0 07-Jun-05 267 --------------------- 268 269 The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several 270 major new pieces of functionality. 271 272 A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA 273 algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases, 274 though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On 275 the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works 276 better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the 277 differences. 278 279 The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new 280 pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides. 281 282 The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built 283 automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this 284 interface. 285 286 The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each 287 function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static 288 linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have 289 their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They 290 are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers. 291 292 The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as 293 multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the 294 ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility 295 programs. 296 297 298 Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 299 --------------------- 300 301 The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more 302 conventional "BSD" licence. 303 304 In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes 305 in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes 306 are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The 307 new features are: 308 309 1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every 310 item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position 311 in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. 312 313 2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character 314 tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used 315 at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the 316 default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled 317 pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything 318 special unless you are using custom tables. 319 320 3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to 321 request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the 322 subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing 323 an input field as it is being typed. 324 325 4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which 326 means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only 327 the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this 328 support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the 329 size of the library dramatically. 330 331 5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. 332 333 6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a 334 different host with the opposite endianness. 335 336 7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. 337 338 The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no 339 longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This 340 makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching 341 possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a 342 result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. 343 344 345 Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 346 --------------------- 347 348 Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features: 349 350 1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive 351 function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows 352 things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks. 353 354 2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to 355 check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the 356 latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET. 357 358 3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code. 359 360 361 Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 362 --------------------- 363 364 This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE 365 checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress 366 this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance. 367 368 369 Releases 4.1 - 4.3 370 ------------------ 371 372 Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a 373 look at ChangeLog. 374 375 376 Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 377 --------------------- 378 379 There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional 380 functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new 381 functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the 382 documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. 383 384 1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. 385 386 2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java 387 package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic 388 grouping". 389 390 3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position 391 is at the start point of the match. 392 393 4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides 394 with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE 395 is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to 396 its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at 397 appropriate points. 398 399 5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really 400 easy to get totally confused. 401 402 6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to 403 name a group. 404 405 7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an 406 option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. 407 408 8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. 409 These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate 410 directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking 411 between the pages has been installed. 412 413 414 Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 415 --------------------- 416 417 1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf 418 and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS 419 supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure 420 command if you want only one of them. 421 422 2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is 423 useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets 424 relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so 425 there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc. 426 427 3. Upgrades to pcregrep: 428 (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep. 429 (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase. 430 (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories. 431 (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file. 432 433 4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure 434 script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix 435 systems, the value can be set in config.h. 436 437 5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an 438 absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and 439 likewise updated the man page. 440 441 6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed. 442 The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit. 443 444 445 Release 3.3 01-Aug-00 446 --------------------- 447 448 There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and 449 experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented. 450 Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release. 451 452 453 Release 3.0 01-Feb-00 454 --------------------- 455 456 1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It 457 builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script. 458 459 2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default. 460 461 3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:]. 462 463 5. There is an experimental recursion feature. 464 465 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 466 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00 467 468 Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger 469 ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace. 470 The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support 471 some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005. 472 473 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00 474 475 Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the 476 pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it 477 possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current 478 locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new arguement 479 should be passed as NULL. 480 481 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05 482 483 Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made 484 to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been 485 added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the 486 subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man 487 page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all 488 you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a 489 value of zero. For example, change 490 491 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize) 492 to 493 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize) 494 495 **** 496
