| News about PCRE releases |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| Release 8.21 12-Dec-2011 |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| This is almost entirely a bug-fix release. The only new feature is the ability |
| to obtain the size of the memory used by the JIT compiler. |
| |
| |
| Release 8.20 21-Oct-2011 |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| The main change in this release is the inclusion of Zoltan Herczeg's |
| just-in-time compiler support, which can be accessed by building PCRE with |
| --enable-jit. Large performance benefits can be had in many situations. 8.20 |
| also fixes an unfortunate bug that was introduced in 8.13 as well as tidying up |
| a number of infelicities and differences from Perl. |
| |
| |
| Release 8.13 16-Aug-2011 |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| This is mainly a bug-fix release. There has been a lot of internal refactoring. |
| The Unicode tables have been updated. The only new feature in the library is |
| the passing of *MARK information to callouts. Some additions have been made to |
| pcretest to make testing easier and more comprehensive. There is a new option |
| for pcregrep to adjust its internal buffer size. |
| |
| |
| Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011 |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail |
| on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library. |
| |
| |
| Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010 |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see |
| ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes: |
| |
| . Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep. |
| |
| . Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options |
| of pcregrep. |
| |
| . Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and |
| \B. |
| |
| . Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a |
| bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD. |
| |
| . Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_ |
| START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time |
| |
| |
| Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010 |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option |
| PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their |
| opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number |
| of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option, |
| --line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to |
| pipes. |
| |
| |
| Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010 |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| Another bug-fix release. |
| |
| |
| Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010 |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and |
| infelicities in the build system have been fixed. |
| |
| |
| Release 8.00 19-Oct-09 |
| ---------------------- |
| |
| Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some |
| enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been |
| removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching |
| process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a |
| full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a |
| lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have |
| duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have |
| different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes. |
| The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate |
| of change is not slowing down. |
| |
| |
| Release 7.9 11-Apr-09 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions. |
| |
| |
| Release 7.8 05-Sep-08 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property |
| lookup. |
| |
| |
| Release 7.7 07-May-08 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new |
| features. |
| |
| |
| Release 7.6 28-Jan-08 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a |
| potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In |
| addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date. |
| |
| |
| Release 7.5 10-Jan-08 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with |
| libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been |
| added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to |
| pcregrep. |
| |
| |
| Release 7.4 21-Sep-07 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether |
| \R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF. |
| Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of |
| relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation |
| updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE |
| has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file. |
| |
| |
| Release 7.3 28-Aug-07 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not: |
| |
| 1. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control |
| verbs" such as (*PRUNE). |
| |
| 2. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more |
| restrictive in the strings it accepts. |
| |
| 3. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a |
| consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that |
| has a limited repeat count. |
| |
| 4. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec() |
| no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match |
| fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern. |
| This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred. |
| |
| 5. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of |
| a pattern have been added. |
| |
| |
| Release 7.2 19-Jun-07 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be |
| recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v, |
| and \V). |
| |
| Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is |
| wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function |
| independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the |
| functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries |
| are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the |
| pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and |
| the basic pcre library. |
| |
| Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added: |
| |
| (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines. |
| |
| (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions. |
| |
| \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>. |
| |
| \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar |
| matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string. |
| |
| (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative |
| start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing |
| parentheses number 1 in both cases. |
| |
| \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively. |
| |
| |
| Release 7.1 24-Apr-07 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of |
| PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which |
| recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks. |
| |
| A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a |
| complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools |
| support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling |
| PCRE in a wide variety of environments. |
| |
| NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built, |
| called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was |
| included in a single dll. |
| |
| Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer |
| compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character |
| tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate |
| the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the |
| "configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a |
| system that uses EBCDIC code. |
| |
| There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is |
| not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling. |
| |
| |
| Release 7.0 19-Dec-06 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| This release has a new major number because there have been some internal |
| upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities, |
| and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely |
| to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance. |
| Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If |
| you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to |
| re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are: |
| |
| 1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds |
| some more scripts. |
| |
| 2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline |
| sequence as a newline. |
| |
| 3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit. |
| |
| 4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include |
| alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for |
| recursion. |
| |
| 5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a |
| QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and |
| assignment. |
| |
| For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. |
| |
| |
| Release 6.7 04-Jul-06 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for |
| multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the |
| library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing). |
| |
| Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been |
| significantly reduced for certain subject strings. |
| |
| |
| Release 6.5 01-Feb-06 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| Important changes in this release: |
| |
| 1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep. |
| |
| 2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the |
| supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic", |
| and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to |
| the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that |
| use \p or \P must be recompiled. |
| |
| 3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all |
| recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for |
| example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because |
| otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work. |
| |
| See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug |
| fixes and tidies. |
| |
| |
| Release 6.0 07-Jun-05 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several |
| major new pieces of functionality. |
| |
| A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA |
| algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases, |
| though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On |
| the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works |
| better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the |
| differences. |
| |
| The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new |
| pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides. |
| |
| The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built |
| automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this |
| interface. |
| |
| The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each |
| function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static |
| linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have |
| their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They |
| are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers. |
| |
| The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as |
| multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the |
| ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility |
| programs. |
| |
| |
| Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more |
| conventional "BSD" licence. |
| |
| In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes |
| in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes |
| are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The |
| new features are: |
| |
| 1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every |
| item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position |
| in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. |
| |
| 2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character |
| tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used |
| at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the |
| default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled |
| pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything |
| special unless you are using custom tables. |
| |
| 3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to |
| request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the |
| subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing |
| an input field as it is being typed. |
| |
| 4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which |
| means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only |
| the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this |
| support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the |
| size of the library dramatically. |
| |
| 5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. |
| |
| 6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a |
| different host with the opposite endianness. |
| |
| 7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. |
| |
| The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no |
| longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This |
| makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching |
| possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a |
| result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. |
| |
| |
| Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features: |
| |
| 1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive |
| function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows |
| things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks. |
| |
| 2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to |
| check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the |
| latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET. |
| |
| 3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code. |
| |
| |
| Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE |
| checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress |
| this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance. |
| |
| |
| Releases 4.1 - 4.3 |
| ------------------ |
| |
| Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a |
| look at ChangeLog. |
| |
| |
| Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional |
| functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new |
| functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the |
| documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. |
| |
| 1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. |
| |
| 2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java |
| package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic |
| grouping". |
| |
| 3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position |
| is at the start point of the match. |
| |
| 4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides |
| with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE |
| is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to |
| its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at |
| appropriate points. |
| |
| 5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really |
| easy to get totally confused. |
| |
| 6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to |
| name a group. |
| |
| 7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an |
| option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. |
| |
| 8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. |
| These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate |
| directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking |
| between the pages has been installed. |
| |
| |
| Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| 1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf |
| and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS |
| supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure |
| command if you want only one of them. |
| |
| 2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is |
| useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets |
| relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so |
| there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc. |
| |
| 3. Upgrades to pcregrep: |
| (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep. |
| (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase. |
| (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories. |
| (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file. |
| |
| 4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure |
| script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix |
| systems, the value can be set in config.h. |
| |
| 5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an |
| absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and |
| likewise updated the man page. |
| |
| 6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed. |
| The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit. |
| |
| |
| Release 3.3 01-Aug-00 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and |
| experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented. |
| Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release. |
| |
| |
| Release 3.0 01-Feb-00 |
| --------------------- |
| |
| 1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It |
| builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script. |
| |
| 2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default. |
| |
| 3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:]. |
| |
| 5. There is an experimental recursion feature. |
| |
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00 |
| |
| Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger |
| ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace. |
| The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support |
| some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005. |
| |
| IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00 |
| |
| Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the |
| pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it |
| possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current |
| locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new arguement |
| should be passed as NULL. |
| |
| IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05 |
| |
| Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made |
| to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been |
| added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the |
| subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man |
| page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all |
| you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a |
| value of zero. For example, change |
| |
| pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize) |
| to |
| pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize) |
| |
| **** |