| The perltest program |
| -------------------- |
| |
| The perltest.pl script tests Perl's regular expressions; it has the same |
| specification as pcretest, and so can be given identical input, except that |
| input patterns can be followed only by Perl's lower case modifiers and certain |
| other pcretest modifiers that are either handled or ignored: |
| |
| /+ recognized and handled by perltest |
| /++ the second + is ignored |
| /8 recognized and handled by perltest |
| /J ignored |
| /K ignored |
| /W ignored |
| /S ignored |
| /SS ignored |
| |
| The data lines are processed as Perl double-quoted strings, so if they contain |
| " $ or @ characters, these have to be escaped. For this reason, all such |
| characters in testinput1, testinput4, testinput6, and testinput11 are escaped |
| so that they can be used for perltest as well as for pcretest. The pcretest \Y |
| escape in data lines is removed. |
| |
| The special upper case pattern modifiers such as /A that pcretest recognizes, |
| and its special data line escapes, are not used in these files. The output |
| should be identical, apart from the initial identifying banner. |
| |
| The perltest.pl script can also test UTF-8 features. It recognizes the special |
| modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke UTF-8 functionality. The testinput4 |
| and testinput6 files can be fed to perltest to run compatible UTF-8 tests. |
| However, it is necessary to add "use utf8;" to the script to make this work |
| correctly. |
| |
| The testinput11 file contains tests that use features of Perl 5.10, so does not |
| work with Perl 5.8. |
| |
| The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest.pl, since |
| they make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that pcretest |
| uses to test some features of PCRE. Some of these files also contains malformed |
| regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses them correctly. |
| |
| Philip Hazel |
| August 2011 |