| Tristan Matthews | 0461646 | 2013-11-14 16:09:34 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 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 certain |
| 7 | other pcretest modifiers that are either handled or ignored: |
| 8 | |
| 9 | /+ recognized and handled by perltest |
| 10 | /++ the second + is ignored |
| 11 | /8 recognized and handled by perltest |
| 12 | /J ignored |
| 13 | /K ignored |
| 14 | /W ignored |
| 15 | /S ignored |
| 16 | /SS ignored |
| 17 | |
| 18 | The data lines are processed as Perl double-quoted strings, so if they contain |
| 19 | " $ or @ characters, these have to be escaped. For this reason, all such |
| 20 | characters in testinput1, testinput4, testinput6, and testinput11 are escaped |
| 21 | so that they can be used for perltest as well as for pcretest. The pcretest \Y |
| 22 | escape in data lines is removed. |
| 23 | |
| 24 | The special upper case pattern modifiers such as /A that pcretest recognizes, |
| 25 | and its special data line escapes, are not used in these files. The output |
| 26 | should be identical, apart from the initial identifying banner. |
| 27 | |
| 28 | The perltest.pl script can also test UTF-8 features. It recognizes the special |
| 29 | modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke UTF-8 functionality. The testinput4 |
| 30 | and testinput6 files can be fed to perltest to run compatible UTF-8 tests. |
| 31 | However, it is necessary to add "use utf8;" to the script to make this work |
| 32 | correctly. |
| 33 | |
| 34 | The testinput11 file contains tests that use features of Perl 5.10, so does not |
| 35 | work with Perl 5.8. |
| 36 | |
| 37 | The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest.pl, since |
| 38 | they make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that pcretest |
| 39 | uses to test some features of PCRE. Some of these files also contains malformed |
| 40 | regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses them correctly. |
| 41 | |
| 42 | Philip Hazel |
| 43 | August 2011 |