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  1. News about PCRE releases
  2. ------------------------
  3. Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is no longer being maintained. New
  4. projects are advised to use the PCRE2 libraries.
  5. Release 8.45 15-June-2021
  6. -----------------------------
  7. This is the final PCRE1 release. A very few small issues have been fixed.
  8. Release 8.44 12-February-2020
  9. -----------------------------
  10. This is a bug-fix release.
  11. Release 8.43 23-February-2019
  12. -----------------------------
  13. This is a bug-fix release.
  14. Release 8.42 20-March-2018
  15. --------------------------
  16. This is a bug-fix release.
  17. Release 8.41 13-June-2017
  18. -------------------------
  19. This is a bug-fix release.
  20. Release 8.40 11-January-2017
  21. ----------------------------
  22. This is a bug-fix release.
  23. Release 8.39 14-June-2016
  24. -------------------------
  25. Some appropriate PCRE2 JIT improvements have been retro-fitted to PCRE1. Apart
  26. from that, this is another bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called
  27. PCRE1) is now being maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to
  28. use the new PCRE2 libraries.
  29. Release 8.38 23-November-2015
  30. -----------------------------
  31. This is bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is now being
  32. maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to use the new PCRE2
  33. libraries.
  34. Release 8.37 28-April-2015
  35. --------------------------
  36. This is bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is now being
  37. maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to use the new PCRE2
  38. libraries.
  39. Release 8.36 26-September-2014
  40. ------------------------------
  41. This is primarily a bug-fix release. However, in addition, the Unicode data
  42. tables have been updated to Unicode 7.0.0.
  43. Release 8.35 04-April-2014
  44. --------------------------
  45. There have been performance improvements for classes containing non-ASCII
  46. characters and the "auto-possessification" feature has been extended. Other
  47. minor improvements have been implemented and bugs fixed. There is a new callout
  48. feature to enable applications to do detailed stack checks at compile time, to
  49. avoid running out of stack for deeply nested parentheses. The JIT compiler has
  50. been extended with experimental support for ARM-64, MIPS-64, and PPC-LE.
  51. Release 8.34 15-December-2013
  52. -----------------------------
  53. As well as fixing the inevitable bugs, performance has been improved by
  54. refactoring and extending the amount of "auto-possessification" that PCRE does.
  55. Other notable changes:
  56. . Implemented PCRE_INFO_MATCH_EMPTY, which yields 1 if the pattern can match
  57. an empty string. If it can, pcretest shows this in its information output.
  58. . A back reference to a named subpattern when there is more than one of the
  59. same name now checks them in the order in which they appear in the pattern.
  60. The first one that is set is used for the reference. Previously only the
  61. first one was inspected. This change makes PCRE more compatible with Perl.
  62. . Unicode character properties were updated from Unicode 6.3.0.
  63. . The character VT has been added to the set of characters that match \s and
  64. are generally treated as white space, following this same change in Perl
  65. 5.18. There is now no difference between "Perl space" and "POSIX space".
  66. . Perl has changed its handling of \8 and \9. If there is no previously
  67. encountered capturing group of those numbers, they are treated as the
  68. literal characters 8 and 9 instead of a binary zero followed by the
  69. literals. PCRE now does the same.
  70. . Following Perl, added \o{} to specify codepoints in octal, making it
  71. possible to specify values greater than 0777 and also making them
  72. unambiguous.
  73. . In UCP mode, \s was not matching two of the characters that Perl matches,
  74. namely NEL (U+0085) and MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR (U+180E), though they
  75. were matched by \h.
  76. . Add JIT support for the 64 bit TileGX architecture.
  77. . Upgraded the handling of the POSIX classes [:graph:], [:print:], and
  78. [:punct:] when PCRE_UCP is set so as to include the same characters as Perl
  79. does in Unicode mode.
  80. . Perl no longer allows group names to start with digits, so I have made this
  81. change also in PCRE.
  82. . Added support for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] as used in the BSD POSIX library to
  83. mean "start of word" and "end of word", respectively, as a transition aid.
  84. Release 8.33 28-May-2013
  85. --------------------------
  86. A number of bugs are fixed, and some performance improvements have been made.
  87. There are also some new features, of which these are the most important:
  88. . The behaviour of the backtracking verbs has been rationalized and
  89. documented in more detail.
  90. . JIT now supports callouts and all of the backtracking verbs.
  91. . Unicode validation has been updated in the light of Unicode Corrigendum #9,
  92. which points out that "non characters" are not "characters that may not
  93. appear in Unicode strings" but rather "characters that are reserved for
  94. internal use and have only local meaning".
  95. . (*LIMIT_MATCH=d) and (*LIMIT_RECURSION=d) have been added so that the
  96. creator of a pattern can specify lower (but not higher) limits for the
  97. matching process.
  98. . The PCRE_NEVER_UTF option is available to prevent pattern-writers from using
  99. the (*UTF) feature, as this could be a security issue.
  100. Release 8.32 30-November-2012
  101. -----------------------------
  102. This release fixes a number of bugs, but also has some new features. These are
  103. the highlights:
  104. . There is now support for 32-bit character strings and UTF-32. Like the
  105. 16-bit support, this is done by compiling a separate 32-bit library.
  106. . \X now matches a Unicode extended grapheme cluster.
  107. . Case-independent matching of Unicode characters that have more than one
  108. "other case" now makes all three (or more) characters equivalent. This
  109. applies, for example, to Greek Sigma, which has two lowercase versions.
  110. . Unicode character properties are updated to Unicode 6.2.0.
  111. . The EBCDIC support, which had decayed, has had a spring clean.
  112. . A number of JIT optimizations have been added, which give faster JIT
  113. execution speed. In addition, a new direct interface to JIT execution is
  114. available. This bypasses some of the sanity checks of pcre_exec() to give a
  115. noticeable speed-up.
  116. . A number of issues in pcregrep have been fixed, making it more compatible
  117. with GNU grep. In particular, --exclude and --include (and variants) apply
  118. to all files now, not just those obtained from scanning a directory
  119. recursively. In Windows environments, the default action for directories is
  120. now "skip" instead of "read" (which provokes an error).
  121. . If the --only-matching (-o) option in pcregrep is specified multiple
  122. times, each one causes appropriate output. For example, -o1 -o2 outputs the
  123. substrings matched by the 1st and 2nd capturing parentheses. A separating
  124. string can be specified by --om-separator (default empty).
  125. . When PCRE is built via Autotools using a version of gcc that has the
  126. "visibility" feature, it is used to hide internal library functions that are
  127. not part of the public API.
  128. Release 8.31 06-July-2012
  129. -------------------------
  130. This is mainly a bug-fixing release, with a small number of developments:
  131. . The JIT compiler now supports partial matching and the (*MARK) and
  132. (*COMMIT) verbs.
  133. . PCRE_INFO_MAXLOOKBEHIND can be used to find the longest lookbehind in a
  134. pattern.
  135. . There should be a performance improvement when using the heap instead of the
  136. stack for recursion.
  137. . pcregrep can now be linked with libedit as an alternative to libreadline.
  138. . pcregrep now has a --file-list option where the list of files to scan is
  139. given as a file.
  140. . pcregrep now recognizes binary files and there are related options.
  141. . The Unicode tables have been updated to 6.1.0.
  142. As always, the full list of changes is in the ChangeLog file.
  143. Release 8.30 04-February-2012
  144. -----------------------------
  145. Release 8.30 introduces a major new feature: support for 16-bit character
  146. strings, compiled as a separate library. There are a few changes to the
  147. 8-bit library, in addition to some bug fixes.
  148. . The pcre_info() function, which has been obsolete for over 10 years, has
  149. been removed.
  150. . When a compiled pattern was saved to a file and later reloaded on a host
  151. with different endianness, PCRE used automatically to swap the bytes in some
  152. of the data fields. With the advent of the 16-bit library, where more of this
  153. swapping is needed, it is no longer done automatically. Instead, the bad
  154. endianness is detected and a specific error is given. The user can then call
  155. a new function called pcre_pattern_to_host_byte_order() (or an equivalent
  156. 16-bit function) to do the swap.
  157. . In UTF-8 mode, the values 0xd800 to 0xdfff are not legal Unicode
  158. code points and are now faulted. (They are the so-called "surrogates"
  159. that are reserved for coding high values in UTF-16.)
  160. Release 8.21 12-Dec-2011
  161. ------------------------
  162. This is almost entirely a bug-fix release. The only new feature is the ability
  163. to obtain the size of the memory used by the JIT compiler.
  164. Release 8.20 21-Oct-2011
  165. ------------------------
  166. The main change in this release is the inclusion of Zoltan Herczeg's
  167. just-in-time compiler support, which can be accessed by building PCRE with
  168. --enable-jit. Large performance benefits can be had in many situations. 8.20
  169. also fixes an unfortunate bug that was introduced in 8.13 as well as tidying up
  170. a number of infelicities and differences from Perl.
  171. Release 8.13 16-Aug-2011
  172. ------------------------
  173. This is mainly a bug-fix release. There has been a lot of internal refactoring.
  174. The Unicode tables have been updated. The only new feature in the library is
  175. the passing of *MARK information to callouts. Some additions have been made to
  176. pcretest to make testing easier and more comprehensive. There is a new option
  177. for pcregrep to adjust its internal buffer size.
  178. Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011
  179. ------------------------
  180. This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail
  181. on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library.
  182. Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010
  183. ------------------------
  184. A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see
  185. ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes:
  186. . Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep.
  187. . Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options
  188. of pcregrep.
  189. . Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and
  190. \B.
  191. . Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a
  192. bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD.
  193. . Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_
  194. START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time
  195. Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010
  196. ------------------------
  197. There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option
  198. PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their
  199. opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number
  200. of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option,
  201. --line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to
  202. pipes.
  203. Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010
  204. ------------------------
  205. Another bug-fix release.
  206. Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010
  207. ------------------------
  208. This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and
  209. infelicities in the build system have been fixed.
  210. Release 8.00 19-Oct-09
  211. ----------------------
  212. Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some
  213. enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been
  214. removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching
  215. process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a
  216. full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a
  217. lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have
  218. duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have
  219. different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes.
  220. The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate
  221. of change is not slowing down.
  222. Release 7.9 11-Apr-09
  223. ---------------------
  224. Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions.
  225. Release 7.8 05-Sep-08
  226. ---------------------
  227. More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property
  228. lookup.
  229. Release 7.7 07-May-08
  230. ---------------------
  231. This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new
  232. features.
  233. Release 7.6 28-Jan-08
  234. ---------------------
  235. The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a
  236. potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In
  237. addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date.
  238. Release 7.5 10-Jan-08
  239. ---------------------
  240. This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with
  241. libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been
  242. added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to
  243. pcregrep.
  244. Release 7.4 21-Sep-07
  245. ---------------------
  246. The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether
  247. \R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF.
  248. Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of
  249. relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation
  250. updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE
  251. has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file.
  252. Release 7.3 28-Aug-07
  253. ---------------------
  254. Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not:
  255. 1. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control
  256. verbs" such as (*PRUNE).
  257. 2. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more
  258. restrictive in the strings it accepts.
  259. 3. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a
  260. consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that
  261. has a limited repeat count.
  262. 4. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec()
  263. no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match
  264. fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern.
  265. This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred.
  266. 5. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of
  267. a pattern have been added.
  268. Release 7.2 19-Jun-07
  269. ---------------------
  270. WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be
  271. recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v,
  272. and \V).
  273. Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is
  274. wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function
  275. independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the
  276. functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries
  277. are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the
  278. pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and
  279. the basic pcre library.
  280. Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added:
  281. (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines.
  282. (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions.
  283. \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>.
  284. \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar
  285. matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string.
  286. (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative
  287. start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing
  288. parentheses number 1 in both cases.
  289. \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively.
  290. Release 7.1 24-Apr-07
  291. ---------------------
  292. There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of
  293. PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which
  294. recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks.
  295. A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a
  296. complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools
  297. support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling
  298. PCRE in a wide variety of environments.
  299. NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built,
  300. called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was
  301. included in a single dll.
  302. Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer
  303. compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character
  304. tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate
  305. the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the
  306. "configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a
  307. system that uses EBCDIC code.
  308. There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is
  309. not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling.
  310. Release 7.0 19-Dec-06
  311. ---------------------
  312. This release has a new major number because there have been some internal
  313. upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities,
  314. and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely
  315. to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance.
  316. Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If
  317. you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to
  318. re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are:
  319. 1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds
  320. some more scripts.
  321. 2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline
  322. sequence as a newline.
  323. 3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit.
  324. 4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include
  325. alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for
  326. recursion.
  327. 5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a
  328. QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and
  329. assignment.
  330. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
  331. Release 6.7 04-Jul-06
  332. ---------------------
  333. The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for
  334. multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the
  335. library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing).
  336. Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been
  337. significantly reduced for certain subject strings.
  338. Release 6.5 01-Feb-06
  339. ---------------------
  340. Important changes in this release:
  341. 1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep.
  342. 2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the
  343. supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic",
  344. and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to
  345. the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that
  346. use \p or \P must be recompiled.
  347. 3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all
  348. recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for
  349. example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because
  350. otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work.
  351. See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug
  352. fixes and tidies.
  353. Release 6.0 07-Jun-05
  354. ---------------------
  355. The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several
  356. major new pieces of functionality.
  357. A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA
  358. algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases,
  359. though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On
  360. the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works
  361. better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the
  362. differences.
  363. The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new
  364. pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides.
  365. The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built
  366. automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this
  367. interface.
  368. The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each
  369. function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static
  370. linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have
  371. their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They
  372. are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers.
  373. The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as
  374. multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the
  375. ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility
  376. programs.
  377. Release 5.0 13-Sep-04
  378. ---------------------
  379. The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more
  380. conventional "BSD" licence.
  381. In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes
  382. in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes
  383. are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The
  384. new features are:
  385. 1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every
  386. item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position
  387. in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing.
  388. 2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character
  389. tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used
  390. at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the
  391. default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled
  392. pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything
  393. special unless you are using custom tables.
  394. 3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to
  395. request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the
  396. subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing
  397. an input field as it is being typed.
  398. 4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which
  399. means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only
  400. the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this
  401. support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the
  402. size of the library dramatically.
  403. 5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later.
  404. 6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a
  405. different host with the opposite endianness.
  406. 7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features.
  407. The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no
  408. longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This
  409. makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching
  410. possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a
  411. result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected.
  412. Release 4.5 01-Dec-03
  413. ---------------------
  414. Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features:
  415. 1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive
  416. function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows
  417. things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks.
  418. 2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to
  419. check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the
  420. latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET.
  421. 3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code.
  422. Release 4.4 21-Aug-03
  423. ---------------------
  424. This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE
  425. checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress
  426. this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance.
  427. Releases 4.1 - 4.3
  428. ------------------
  429. Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a
  430. look at ChangeLog.
  431. Release 4.0 17-Feb-03
  432. ---------------------
  433. There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional
  434. functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new
  435. functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the
  436. documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
  437. 1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes.
  438. 2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java
  439. package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic
  440. grouping".
  441. 3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position
  442. is at the start point of the match.
  443. 4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides
  444. with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE
  445. is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to
  446. its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at
  447. appropriate points.
  448. 5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really
  449. easy to get totally confused.
  450. 6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to
  451. name a group.
  452. 7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an
  453. option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode.
  454. 8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages.
  455. These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate
  456. directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking
  457. between the pages has been installed.
  458. Release 3.5 15-Aug-01
  459. ---------------------
  460. 1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf
  461. and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS
  462. supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure
  463. command if you want only one of them.
  464. 2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is
  465. useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets
  466. relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so
  467. there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc.
  468. 3. Upgrades to pcregrep:
  469. (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep.
  470. (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase.
  471. (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories.
  472. (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file.
  473. 4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure
  474. script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix
  475. systems, the value can be set in config.h.
  476. 5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an
  477. absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and
  478. likewise updated the man page.
  479. 6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed.
  480. The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit.
  481. Release 3.3 01-Aug-00
  482. ---------------------
  483. There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and
  484. experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented.
  485. Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release.
  486. Release 3.0 01-Feb-00
  487. ---------------------
  488. 1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It
  489. builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script.
  490. 2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default.
  491. 3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:].
  492. 5. There is an experimental recursion feature.
  493. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  494. IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00
  495. Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger
  496. ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace.
  497. The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support
  498. some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005.
  499. IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00
  500. Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the
  501. pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it
  502. possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current
  503. locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new argument
  504. should be passed as NULL.
  505. IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05
  506. Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made
  507. to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been
  508. added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the
  509. subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man
  510. page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all
  511. you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a
  512. value of zero. For example, change
  513. pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize)
  514. to
  515. pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize)
  516. ****