1 The perltest program 2 -------------------- 3 4 The perltest.pl script tests Perl's regular expressions; it has the same 5 specification as pcretest, and so can be given identical input, except that 6 input patterns can be followed only by Perl's lower case modifiers and certain 7 other pcretest modifiers that are either handled or ignored: 8 9 /+ recognized and handled by perltest 10 /++ the second + is ignored 11 /8 recognized and handled by perltest 12 /J ignored 13 /K ignored 14 /W ignored 15 /S ignored 16 /SS ignored 17 /Y ignored 18 19 The pcretest \Y escape in data lines is removed before matching. The data lines 20 are processed as Perl double-quoted strings, so if they contain " $ or @ 21 characters, these have to be escaped. For this reason, all such characters in 22 the Perl-compatible testinput1 file are escaped so that they can be used for 23 perltest as well as for pcretest. The special upper case pattern modifiers such 24 as /A that pcretest recognizes, and its special data line escapes, are not used 25 in the Perl-compatible test file. The output should be identical, apart from 26 the initial identifying banner. 27 28 The perltest.pl script can also test UTF-8 features. It recognizes the special 29 modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke UTF-8 functionality. The testinput4 30 and testinput6 files can be fed to perltest to run compatible UTF-8 tests. 31 However, it is necessary to add "use utf8; require Encode" to the script to 32 make this work correctly. I have not managed to find a way to handle this 33 automatically. 34 35 The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest.pl, since 36 they make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that pcretest 37 uses to test certain features of PCRE. Some of these files also contain 38 malformed regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses them 39 correctly. 40 41 Philip Hazel 42 January 2012 43
