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# Line 15  man page, in case the conversion went wr Line 15  man page, in case the conversion went wr
15  <ul>  <ul>
16  <li><a name="TOC1" href="#SEC1">INTRODUCTION</a>  <li><a name="TOC1" href="#SEC1">INTRODUCTION</a>
17  <li><a name="TOC2" href="#SEC2">USER DOCUMENTATION</a>  <li><a name="TOC2" href="#SEC2">USER DOCUMENTATION</a>
18  <li><a name="TOC3" href="#SEC3">LIMITATIONS</a>  <li><a name="TOC3" href="#SEC3">AUTHOR</a>
19  <li><a name="TOC4" href="#SEC4">UTF-8 AND UNICODE PROPERTY SUPPORT</a>  <li><a name="TOC4" href="#SEC4">REVISION</a>
 <li><a name="TOC5" href="#SEC5">AUTHOR</a>  
 <li><a name="TOC6" href="#SEC6">REVISION</a>  
20  </ul>  </ul>
21  <br><a name="SEC1" href="#TOC1">INTRODUCTION</a><br>  <br><a name="SEC1" href="#TOC1">INTRODUCTION</a><br>
22  <P>  <P>
# Line 100  of searching. The sections are as follow Line 98  of searching. The sections are as follow
98    pcrecpp           details of the C++ wrapper    pcrecpp           details of the C++ wrapper
99    pcredemo          a demonstration C program that uses PCRE    pcredemo          a demonstration C program that uses PCRE
100    pcregrep          description of the <b>pcregrep</b> command    pcregrep          description of the <b>pcregrep</b> command
101      pcrejit           discussion of the just-in-time optimization support
102      pcrelimits        details of size and other limits
103    pcrematching      discussion of the two matching algorithms    pcrematching      discussion of the two matching algorithms
104    pcrepartial       details of the partial matching facility    pcrepartial       details of the partial matching facility
105    pcrepattern       syntax and semantics of supported regular expressions    pcrepattern       syntax and semantics of supported regular expressions
# Line 110  of searching. The sections are as follow Line 110  of searching. The sections are as follow
110    pcrestack         discussion of stack usage    pcrestack         discussion of stack usage
111    pcresyntax        quick syntax reference    pcresyntax        quick syntax reference
112    pcretest          description of the <b>pcretest</b> testing command    pcretest          description of the <b>pcretest</b> testing command
113      pcreunicode       discussion of Unicode and UTF-8 support
114  </pre>  </pre>
115  In addition, in the "man" and HTML formats, there is a short page for each  In addition, in the "man" and HTML formats, there is a short page for each
116  C library function, listing its arguments and results.  C library function, listing its arguments and results.
117  </P>  </P>
118  <br><a name="SEC3" href="#TOC1">LIMITATIONS</a><br>  <br><a name="SEC3" href="#TOC1">AUTHOR</a><br>
 <P>  
 There are some size limitations in PCRE but it is hoped that they will never in  
 practice be relevant.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 The maximum length of a compiled pattern is 65539 (sic) bytes if PCRE is  
 compiled with the default internal linkage size of 2. If you want to process  
 regular expressions that are truly enormous, you can compile PCRE with an  
 internal linkage size of 3 or 4 (see the <b>README</b> file in the source  
 distribution and the  
 <a href="pcrebuild.html"><b>pcrebuild</b></a>  
 documentation for details). In these cases the limit is substantially larger.  
 However, the speed of execution is slower.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 All values in repeating quantifiers must be less than 65536.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 There is no limit to the number of parenthesized subpatterns, but there can be  
 no more than 65535 capturing subpatterns.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 The maximum length of name for a named subpattern is 32 characters, and the  
 maximum number of named subpatterns is 10000.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 The maximum length of a subject string is the largest positive number that an  
 integer variable can hold. However, when using the traditional matching  
 function, PCRE uses recursion to handle subpatterns and indefinite repetition.  
 This means that the available stack space may limit the size of a subject  
 string that can be processed by certain patterns. For a discussion of stack  
 issues, see the  
 <a href="pcrestack.html"><b>pcrestack</b></a>  
 documentation.  
 <a name="utf8support"></a></P>  
 <br><a name="SEC4" href="#TOC1">UTF-8 AND UNICODE PROPERTY SUPPORT</a><br>  
 <P>  
 From release 3.3, PCRE has had some support for character strings encoded in  
 the UTF-8 format. For release 4.0 this was greatly extended to cover most  
 common requirements, and in release 5.0 additional support for Unicode general  
 category properties was added.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 In order process UTF-8 strings, you must build PCRE to include UTF-8 support in  
 the code, and, in addition, you must call  
 <a href="pcre_compile.html"><b>pcre_compile()</b></a>  
 with the PCRE_UTF8 option flag, or the pattern must start with the sequence  
 (*UTF8). When either of these is the case, both the pattern and any subject  
 strings that are matched against it are treated as UTF-8 strings instead of  
 strings of 1-byte characters.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 If you compile PCRE with UTF-8 support, but do not use it at run time, the  
 library will be a bit bigger, but the additional run time overhead is limited  
 to testing the PCRE_UTF8 flag occasionally, so should not be very big.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 If PCRE is built with Unicode character property support (which implies UTF-8  
 support), the escape sequences \p{..}, \P{..}, and \X are supported.  
 The available properties that can be tested are limited to the general  
 category properties such as Lu for an upper case letter or Nd for a decimal  
 number, the Unicode script names such as Arabic or Han, and the derived  
 properties Any and L&. A full list is given in the  
 <a href="pcrepattern.html"><b>pcrepattern</b></a>  
 documentation. Only the short names for properties are supported. For example,  
 \p{L} matches a letter. Its Perl synonym, \p{Letter}, is not supported.  
 Furthermore, in Perl, many properties may optionally be prefixed by "Is", for  
 compatibility with Perl 5.6. PCRE does not support this.  
 <a name="utf8strings"></a></P>  
 <br><b>  
 Validity of UTF-8 strings  
 </b><br>  
 <P>  
 When you set the PCRE_UTF8 flag, the strings passed as patterns and subjects  
 are (by default) checked for validity on entry to the relevant functions. From  
 release 7.3 of PCRE, the check is according the rules of RFC 3629, which are  
 themselves derived from the Unicode specification. Earlier releases of PCRE  
 followed the rules of RFC 2279, which allows the full range of 31-bit values (0  
 to 0x7FFFFFFF). The current check allows only values in the range U+0 to  
 U+10FFFF, excluding U+D800 to U+DFFF.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 The excluded code points are the "Low Surrogate Area" of Unicode, of which the  
 Unicode Standard says this: "The Low Surrogate Area does not contain any  
 character assignments, consequently no character code charts or namelists are  
 provided for this area. Surrogates are reserved for use with UTF-16 and then  
 must be used in pairs." The code points that are encoded by UTF-16 pairs are  
 available as independent code points in the UTF-8 encoding. (In other words,  
 the whole surrogate thing is a fudge for UTF-16 which unfortunately messes up  
 UTF-8.)  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 If an invalid UTF-8 string is passed to PCRE, an error return is given. At  
 compile time, the only additional information is the offset to the first byte  
 of the failing character. The runtime functions (<b>pcre_exec()</b> and  
 <b>pcre_dfa_exec()</b>), pass back this information as well as a more detailed  
 reason code if the caller has provided memory in which to do this.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 In some situations, you may already know that your strings are valid, and  
 therefore want to skip these checks in order to improve performance. If you set  
 the PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK flag at compile time or at run time, PCRE assumes that  
 the pattern or subject it is given (respectively) contains only valid UTF-8  
 codes. In this case, it does not diagnose an invalid UTF-8 string.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 If you pass an invalid UTF-8 string when PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK is set, what  
 happens depends on why the string is invalid. If the string conforms to the  
 "old" definition of UTF-8 (RFC 2279), it is processed as a string of characters  
 in the range 0 to 0x7FFFFFFF. In other words, apart from the initial validity  
 test, PCRE (when in UTF-8 mode) handles strings according to the more liberal  
 rules of RFC 2279. However, if the string does not even conform to RFC 2279,  
 the result is undefined. Your program may crash.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 If you want to process strings of values in the full range 0 to 0x7FFFFFFF,  
 encoded in a UTF-8-like manner as per the old RFC, you can set  
 PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK to bypass the more restrictive test. However, in this  
 situation, you will have to apply your own validity check.  
 </P>  
 <br><b>  
 General comments about UTF-8 mode  
 </b><br>  
 <P>  
 1. An unbraced hexadecimal escape sequence (such as \xb3) matches a two-byte  
 UTF-8 character if the value is greater than 127.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 2. Octal numbers up to \777 are recognized, and match two-byte UTF-8  
 characters for values greater than \177.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 3. Repeat quantifiers apply to complete UTF-8 characters, not to individual  
 bytes, for example: \x{100}{3}.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 4. The dot metacharacter matches one UTF-8 character instead of a single byte.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 5. The escape sequence \C can be used to match a single byte in UTF-8 mode,  
 but its use can lead to some strange effects. This facility is not available in  
 the alternative matching function, <b>pcre_dfa_exec()</b>.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 6. The character escapes \b, \B, \d, \D, \s, \S, \w, and \W correctly  
 test characters of any code value, but, by default, the characters that PCRE  
 recognizes as digits, spaces, or word characters remain the same set as before,  
 all with values less than 256. This remains true even when PCRE is built to  
 include Unicode property support, because to do otherwise would slow down PCRE  
 in many common cases. Note in particular that this applies to \b and \B,  
 because they are defined in terms of \w and \W. If you really want to test  
 for a wider sense of, say, "digit", you can use explicit Unicode property tests  
 such as \p{Nd}. Alternatively, if you set the PCRE_UCP option, the way that  
 the character escapes work is changed so that Unicode properties are used to  
 determine which characters match. There are more details in the section on  
 <a href="pcrepattern.html#genericchartypes">generic character types</a>  
 in the  
 <a href="pcrepattern.html"><b>pcrepattern</b></a>  
 documentation.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 7. Similarly, characters that match the POSIX named character classes are all  
 low-valued characters, unless the PCRE_UCP option is set.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 8. However, the horizontal and vertical whitespace matching escapes (\h, \H,  
 \v, and \V) do match all the appropriate Unicode characters, whether or not  
 PCRE_UCP is set.  
 </P>  
 <P>  
 9. Case-insensitive matching applies only to characters whose values are less  
 than 128, unless PCRE is built with Unicode property support. Even when Unicode  
 property support is available, PCRE still uses its own character tables when  
 checking the case of low-valued characters, so as not to degrade performance.  
 The Unicode property information is used only for characters with higher  
 values. Furthermore, PCRE supports case-insensitive matching only when there is  
 a one-to-one mapping between a letter's cases. There are a small number of  
 many-to-one mappings in Unicode; these are not supported by PCRE.  
 </P>  
 <br><a name="SEC5" href="#TOC1">AUTHOR</a><br>  
119  <P>  <P>
120  Philip Hazel  Philip Hazel
121  <br>  <br>
# Line 308  Putting an actual email address here see Line 129  Putting an actual email address here see
129  taken it away. If you want to email me, use my two initials, followed by the  taken it away. If you want to email me, use my two initials, followed by the
130  two digits 10, at the domain cam.ac.uk.  two digits 10, at the domain cam.ac.uk.
131  </P>  </P>
132  <br><a name="SEC6" href="#TOC1">REVISION</a><br>  <br><a name="SEC4" href="#TOC1">REVISION</a><br>
133  <P>  <P>
134  Last updated: 07 May 2011  Last updated: 24 August 2011
135  <br>  <br>
136  Copyright &copy; 1997-2011 University of Cambridge.  Copyright &copy; 1997-2011 University of Cambridge.
137  <br>  <br>
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