| 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 /+ (as
|
| 7 |
used by pcretest), which is recognized and handled by the program.
|
| 8 |
|
| 9 |
The data lines are processed as Perl double-quoted strings, so if they contain
|
| 10 |
" $ or @ characters, these have to be escaped. For this reason, all such
|
| 11 |
characters in testinput1, testinput4, testinput6, and testinput11 are escaped
|
| 12 |
so that they can be used for perltest as well as for pcretest. The special
|
| 13 |
upper case pattern modifiers such as /A that pcretest recognizes, and its
|
| 14 |
special data line escapes, are not used in these files. The output should be
|
| 15 |
identical, apart from the initial identifying banner.
|
| 16 |
|
| 17 |
The perltest.pl script can also test UTF-8 features. It recognizes the special
|
| 18 |
modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke UTF-8 functionality. The testinput4
|
| 19 |
and testinput6 files can be fed to perltest to run compatible UTF-8 tests.
|
| 20 |
However, it is necessary to add "use utf8;" to the script to make this work
|
| 21 |
correctly.
|
| 22 |
|
| 23 |
The testinput11 file contains tests that use features of Perl 5.10, so does not
|
| 24 |
work with Perl 5.8.
|
| 25 |
|
| 26 |
The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest.pl, since
|
| 27 |
they make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that pcretest
|
| 28 |
uses to test some features of PCRE. Some of these files also contains malformed
|
| 29 |
regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses them correctly.
|
| 30 |
|
| 31 |
Philip Hazel
|
| 32 |
October 2009
|
Parent Directory
| 
Revision Log