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News about PCRE releases |
News about PCRE releases |
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Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 |
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The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more |
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conventional "BSD" licence. |
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In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes |
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in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes |
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are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The |
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new features are: |
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1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every |
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item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position |
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in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. |
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2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character |
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tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used |
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at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the |
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default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled |
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pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything |
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special unless you are using custom tables. |
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3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to |
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request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the |
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subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing |
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an input field as it is being typed. |
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4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which |
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means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only |
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the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this |
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support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the |
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size of the library dramatically. |
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5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. |
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6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a |
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different host with the opposite endianness. |
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7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. |
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The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no |
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longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This |
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makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching |
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possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a |
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result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. |
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Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 |
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Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features: |
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1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive |
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function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows |
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things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks. |
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2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to |
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check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the |
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latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET. |
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3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code. |
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Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 |
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This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE |
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checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress |
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this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance. |
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Releases 4.1 - 4.3 |
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------------------ |
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Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a |
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look at ChangeLog. |
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Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 |
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There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional |
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functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new |
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functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the |
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documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. |
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1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. |
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2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java |
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package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic |
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grouping". |
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3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position |
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is at the start point of the match. |
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4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides |
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with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE |
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is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to |
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its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at |
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appropriate points. |
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5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really |
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easy to get totally confused. |
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6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to |
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name a group. |
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7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an |
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option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. |
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8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. |
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These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate |
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directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking |
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between the pages has been installed. |
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Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 |
Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 |
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