| 1 |
News about PCRE releases |
News about PCRE releases |
| 2 |
------------------------ |
------------------------ |
| 3 |
|
|
| 4 |
|
Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 |
| 5 |
|
--------------------- |
| 6 |
|
|
| 7 |
|
The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more |
| 8 |
|
conventional "BSD" licence. |
| 9 |
|
|
| 10 |
|
In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes |
| 11 |
|
in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes |
| 12 |
|
are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The |
| 13 |
|
new features are: |
| 14 |
|
|
| 15 |
|
1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every |
| 16 |
|
item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position |
| 17 |
|
in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. |
| 18 |
|
|
| 19 |
|
2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character |
| 20 |
|
tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used |
| 21 |
|
at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the |
| 22 |
|
default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled |
| 23 |
|
pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything |
| 24 |
|
special unless you are using custom tables. |
| 25 |
|
|
| 26 |
|
3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to |
| 27 |
|
request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the |
| 28 |
|
subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing |
| 29 |
|
an input field as it is being typed. |
| 30 |
|
|
| 31 |
|
4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which |
| 32 |
|
means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only |
| 33 |
|
the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this |
| 34 |
|
support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the |
| 35 |
|
size of the library dramatically. |
| 36 |
|
|
| 37 |
|
5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. |
| 38 |
|
|
| 39 |
|
6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a |
| 40 |
|
different host with the opposite endianness. |
| 41 |
|
|
| 42 |
|
7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. |
| 43 |
|
|
| 44 |
|
The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no |
| 45 |
|
longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This |
| 46 |
|
makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching |
| 47 |
|
possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a |
| 48 |
|
result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. |
| 49 |
|
|
| 50 |
|
|
| 51 |
Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 |
Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 |
| 52 |
--------------------- |
--------------------- |
| 53 |
|
|