1 News about PCRE releases 2 ------------------------ 3 4 Release 8.36 26-September-2014 5 ------------------------------ 6 7 This is primarily a bug-fix release. However, in addition, the Unicode data 8 tables have been updated to Unicode 7.0.0. 9 10 11 Release 8.35 04-April-2014 12 -------------------------- 13 14 There have been performance improvements for classes containing non-ASCII 15 characters and the "auto-possessification" feature has been extended. Other 16 minor improvements have been implemented and bugs fixed. There is a new callout 17 feature to enable applications to do detailed stack checks at compile time, to 18 avoid running out of stack for deeply nested parentheses. The JIT compiler has 19 been extended with experimental support for ARM-64, MIPS-64, and PPC-LE. 20 21 22 Release 8.34 15-December-2013 23 ----------------------------- 24 25 As well as fixing the inevitable bugs, performance has been improved by 26 refactoring and extending the amount of "auto-possessification" that PCRE does. 27 Other notable changes: 28 29 . Implemented PCRE_INFO_MATCH_EMPTY, which yields 1 if the pattern can match 30 an empty string. If it can, pcretest shows this in its information output. 31 32 . A back reference to a named subpattern when there is more than one of the 33 same name now checks them in the order in which they appear in the pattern. 34 The first one that is set is used for the reference. Previously only the 35 first one was inspected. This change makes PCRE more compatible with Perl. 36 37 . Unicode character properties were updated from Unicode 6.3.0. 38 39 . The character VT has been added to the set of characters that match \s and 40 are generally treated as white space, following this same change in Perl 41 5.18. There is now no difference between "Perl space" and "POSIX space". 42 43 . Perl has changed its handling of \8 and \9. If there is no previously 44 encountered capturing group of those numbers, they are treated as the 45 literal characters 8 and 9 instead of a binary zero followed by the 46 literals. PCRE now does the same. 47 48 . Following Perl, added \o{} to specify codepoints in octal, making it 49 possible to specify values greater than 0777 and also making them 50 unambiguous. 51 52 . In UCP mode, \s was not matching two of the characters that Perl matches, 53 namely NEL (U+0085) and MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR (U+180E), though they 54 were matched by \h. 55 56 . Add JIT support for the 64 bit TileGX architecture. 57 58 . Upgraded the handling of the POSIX classes [:graph:], [:print:], and 59 [:punct:] when PCRE_UCP is set so as to include the same characters as Perl 60 does in Unicode mode. 61 62 . Perl no longer allows group names to start with digits, so I have made this 63 change also in PCRE. 64 65 . Added support for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] as used in the BSD POSIX library to 66 mean "start of word" and "end of word", respectively, as a transition aid. 67 68 69 Release 8.33 28-May-2013 70 -------------------------- 71 72 A number of bugs are fixed, and some performance improvements have been made. 73 There are also some new features, of which these are the most important: 74 75 . The behaviour of the backtracking verbs has been rationalized and 76 documented in more detail. 77 78 . JIT now supports callouts and all of the backtracking verbs. 79 80 . Unicode validation has been updated in the light of Unicode Corrigendum #9, 81 which points out that "non characters" are not "characters that may not 82 appear in Unicode strings" but rather "characters that are reserved for 83 internal use and have only local meaning". 84 85 . (*LIMIT_MATCH=d) and (*LIMIT_RECURSION=d) have been added so that the 86 creator of a pattern can specify lower (but not higher) limits for the 87 matching process. 88 89 . The PCRE_NEVER_UTF option is available to prevent pattern-writers from using 90 the (*UTF) feature, as this could be a security issue. 91 92 93 Release 8.32 30-November-2012 94 ----------------------------- 95 96 This release fixes a number of bugs, but also has some new features. These are 97 the highlights: 98 99 . There is now support for 32-bit character strings and UTF-32. Like the 100 16-bit support, this is done by compiling a separate 32-bit library. 101 102 . \X now matches a Unicode extended grapheme cluster. 103 104 . Case-independent matching of Unicode characters that have more than one 105 "other case" now makes all three (or more) characters equivalent. This 106 applies, for example, to Greek Sigma, which has two lowercase versions. 107 108 . Unicode character properties are updated to Unicode 6.2.0. 109 110 . The EBCDIC support, which had decayed, has had a spring clean. 111 112 . A number of JIT optimizations have been added, which give faster JIT 113 execution speed. In addition, a new direct interface to JIT execution is 114 available. This bypasses some of the sanity checks of pcre_exec() to give a 115 noticeable speed-up. 116 117 . A number of issues in pcregrep have been fixed, making it more compatible 118 with GNU grep. In particular, --exclude and --include (and variants) apply 119 to all files now, not just those obtained from scanning a directory 120 recursively. In Windows environments, the default action for directories is 121 now "skip" instead of "read" (which provokes an error). 122 123 . If the --only-matching (-o) option in pcregrep is specified multiple 124 times, each one causes appropriate output. For example, -o1 -o2 outputs the 125 substrings matched by the 1st and 2nd capturing parentheses. A separating 126 string can be specified by --om-separator (default empty). 127 128 . When PCRE is built via Autotools using a version of gcc that has the 129 "visibility" feature, it is used to hide internal library functions that are 130 not part of the public API. 131 132 133 Release 8.31 06-July-2012 134 ------------------------- 135 136 This is mainly a bug-fixing release, with a small number of developments: 137 138 . The JIT compiler now supports partial matching and the (*MARK) and 139 (*COMMIT) verbs. 140 141 . PCRE_INFO_MAXLOOKBEHIND can be used to find the longest lookbehind in a 142 pattern. 143 144 . There should be a performance improvement when using the heap instead of the 145 stack for recursion. 146 147 . pcregrep can now be linked with libedit as an alternative to libreadline. 148 149 . pcregrep now has a --file-list option where the list of files to scan is 150 given as a file. 151 152 . pcregrep now recognizes binary files and there are related options. 153 154 . The Unicode tables have been updated to 6.1.0. 155 156 As always, the full list of changes is in the ChangeLog file. 157 158 159 Release 8.30 04-February-2012 160 ----------------------------- 161 162 Release 8.30 introduces a major new feature: support for 16-bit character 163 strings, compiled as a separate library. There are a few changes to the 164 8-bit library, in addition to some bug fixes. 165 166 . The pcre_info() function, which has been obsolete for over 10 years, has 167 been removed. 168 169 . When a compiled pattern was saved to a file and later reloaded on a host 170 with different endianness, PCRE used automatically to swap the bytes in some 171 of the data fields. With the advent of the 16-bit library, where more of this 172 swapping is needed, it is no longer done automatically. Instead, the bad 173 endianness is detected and a specific error is given. The user can then call 174 a new function called pcre_pattern_to_host_byte_order() (or an equivalent 175 16-bit function) to do the swap. 176 177 . In UTF-8 mode, the values 0xd800 to 0xdfff are not legal Unicode 178 code points and are now faulted. (They are the so-called "surrogates" 179 that are reserved for coding high values in UTF-16.) 180 181 182 Release 8.21 12-Dec-2011 183 ------------------------ 184 185 This is almost entirely a bug-fix release. The only new feature is the ability 186 to obtain the size of the memory used by the JIT compiler. 187 188 189 Release 8.20 21-Oct-2011 190 ------------------------ 191 192 The main change in this release is the inclusion of Zoltan Herczeg's 193 just-in-time compiler support, which can be accessed by building PCRE with 194 --enable-jit. Large performance benefits can be had in many situations. 8.20 195 also fixes an unfortunate bug that was introduced in 8.13 as well as tidying up 196 a number of infelicities and differences from Perl. 197 198 199 Release 8.13 16-Aug-2011 200 ------------------------ 201 202 This is mainly a bug-fix release. There has been a lot of internal refactoring. 203 The Unicode tables have been updated. The only new feature in the library is 204 the passing of *MARK information to callouts. Some additions have been made to 205 pcretest to make testing easier and more comprehensive. There is a new option 206 for pcregrep to adjust its internal buffer size. 207 208 209 Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011 210 ------------------------ 211 212 This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail 213 on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library. 214 215 216 Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010 217 ------------------------ 218 219 A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see 220 ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes: 221 222 . Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep. 223 224 . Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options 225 of pcregrep. 226 227 . Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and 228 \B. 229 230 . Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a 231 bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD. 232 233 . Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_ 234 START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time 235 236 237 Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010 238 ------------------------ 239 240 There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option 241 PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their 242 opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number 243 of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option, 244 --line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to 245 pipes. 246 247 248 Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010 249 ------------------------ 250 251 Another bug-fix release. 252 253 254 Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010 255 ------------------------ 256 257 This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and 258 infelicities in the build system have been fixed. 259 260 261 Release 8.00 19-Oct-09 262 ---------------------- 263 264 Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some 265 enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been 266 removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching 267 process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a 268 full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a 269 lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have 270 duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have 271 different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes. 272 The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate 273 of change is not slowing down. 274 275 276 Release 7.9 11-Apr-09 277 --------------------- 278 279 Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions. 280 281 282 Release 7.8 05-Sep-08 283 --------------------- 284 285 More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property 286 lookup. 287 288 289 Release 7.7 07-May-08 290 --------------------- 291 292 This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new 293 features. 294 295 296 Release 7.6 28-Jan-08 297 --------------------- 298 299 The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a 300 potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In 301 addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date. 302 303 304 Release 7.5 10-Jan-08 305 --------------------- 306 307 This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with 308 libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been 309 added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to 310 pcregrep. 311 312 313 Release 7.4 21-Sep-07 314 --------------------- 315 316 The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether 317 \R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF. 318 Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of 319 relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation 320 updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE 321 has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file. 322 323 324 Release 7.3 28-Aug-07 325 --------------------- 326 327 Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not: 328 329 1. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control 330 verbs" such as (*PRUNE). 331 332 2. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more 333 restrictive in the strings it accepts. 334 335 3. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a 336 consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that 337 has a limited repeat count. 338 339 4. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec() 340 no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match 341 fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern. 342 This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred. 343 344 5. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of 345 a pattern have been added. 346 347 348 Release 7.2 19-Jun-07 349 --------------------- 350 351 WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be 352 recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v, 353 and \V). 354 355 Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is 356 wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function 357 independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the 358 functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries 359 are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the 360 pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and 361 the basic pcre library. 362 363 Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added: 364 365 (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines. 366 367 (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions. 368 369 \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>. 370 371 \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar 372 matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string. 373 374 (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative 375 start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing 376 parentheses number 1 in both cases. 377 378 \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively. 379 380 381 Release 7.1 24-Apr-07 382 --------------------- 383 384 There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of 385 PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which 386 recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks. 387 388 A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a 389 complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools 390 support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling 391 PCRE in a wide variety of environments. 392 393 NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built, 394 called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was 395 included in a single dll. 396 397 Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer 398 compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character 399 tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate 400 the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the 401 "configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a 402 system that uses EBCDIC code. 403 404 There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is 405 not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling. 406 407 408 Release 7.0 19-Dec-06 409 --------------------- 410 411 This release has a new major number because there have been some internal 412 upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities, 413 and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely 414 to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance. 415 Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If 416 you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to 417 re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are: 418 419 1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds 420 some more scripts. 421 422 2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline 423 sequence as a newline. 424 425 3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit. 426 427 4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include 428 alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for 429 recursion. 430 431 5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a 432 QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and 433 assignment. 434 435 For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. 436 437 438 Release 6.7 04-Jul-06 439 --------------------- 440 441 The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for 442 multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the 443 library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing). 444 445 Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been 446 significantly reduced for certain subject strings. 447 448 449 Release 6.5 01-Feb-06 450 --------------------- 451 452 Important changes in this release: 453 454 1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep. 455 456 2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the 457 supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic", 458 and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to 459 the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that 460 use \p or \P must be recompiled. 461 462 3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all 463 recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for 464 example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because 465 otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work. 466 467 See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug 468 fixes and tidies. 469 470 471 Release 6.0 07-Jun-05 472 --------------------- 473 474 The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several 475 major new pieces of functionality. 476 477 A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA 478 algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases, 479 though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On 480 the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works 481 better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the 482 differences. 483 484 The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new 485 pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides. 486 487 The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built 488 automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this 489 interface. 490 491 The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each 492 function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static 493 linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have 494 their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They 495 are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers. 496 497 The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as 498 multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the 499 ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility 500 programs. 501 502 503 Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 504 --------------------- 505 506 The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more 507 conventional "BSD" licence. 508 509 In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes 510 in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes 511 are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The 512 new features are: 513 514 1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every 515 item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position 516 in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. 517 518 2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character 519 tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used 520 at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the 521 default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled 522 pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything 523 special unless you are using custom tables. 524 525 3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to 526 request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the 527 subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing 528 an input field as it is being typed. 529 530 4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which 531 means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only 532 the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this 533 support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the 534 size of the library dramatically. 535 536 5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. 537 538 6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a 539 different host with the opposite endianness. 540 541 7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. 542 543 The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no 544 longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This 545 makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching 546 possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a 547 result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. 548 549 550 Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 551 --------------------- 552 553 Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features: 554 555 1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive 556 function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows 557 things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks. 558 559 2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to 560 check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the 561 latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET. 562 563 3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code. 564 565 566 Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 567 --------------------- 568 569 This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE 570 checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress 571 this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance. 572 573 574 Releases 4.1 - 4.3 575 ------------------ 576 577 Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a 578 look at ChangeLog. 579 580 581 Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 582 --------------------- 583 584 There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional 585 functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new 586 functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the 587 documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. 588 589 1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. 590 591 2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java 592 package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic 593 grouping". 594 595 3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position 596 is at the start point of the match. 597 598 4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides 599 with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE 600 is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to 601 its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at 602 appropriate points. 603 604 5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really 605 easy to get totally confused. 606 607 6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to 608 name a group. 609 610 7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an 611 option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. 612 613 8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. 614 These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate 615 directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking 616 between the pages has been installed. 617 618 619 Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 620 --------------------- 621 622 1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf 623 and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS 624 supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure 625 command if you want only one of them. 626 627 2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is 628 useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets 629 relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so 630 there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc. 631 632 3. Upgrades to pcregrep: 633 (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep. 634 (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase. 635 (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories. 636 (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file. 637 638 4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure 639 script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix 640 systems, the value can be set in config.h. 641 642 5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an 643 absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and 644 likewise updated the man page. 645 646 6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed. 647 The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit. 648 649 650 Release 3.3 01-Aug-00 651 --------------------- 652 653 There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and 654 experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented. 655 Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release. 656 657 658 Release 3.0 01-Feb-00 659 --------------------- 660 661 1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It 662 builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script. 663 664 2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default. 665 666 3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:]. 667 668 5. There is an experimental recursion feature. 669 670 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 671 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00 672 673 Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger 674 ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace. 675 The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support 676 some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005. 677 678 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00 679 680 Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the 681 pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it 682 possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current 683 locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new argument 684 should be passed as NULL. 685 686 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05 687 688 Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made 689 to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been 690 added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the 691 subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man 692 page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all 693 you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a 694 value of zero. For example, change 695 696 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize) 697 to 698 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize) 699 700 **** 701