1 News about PCRE releases
2 ------------------------
4 Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010
5 ------------------------
7 A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see
8 ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes:
10 . Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep.
12 . Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options
15 . Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and
18 . Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a
19 bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD.
21 . Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_
22 START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time
25 Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010
26 ------------------------
28 There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option
29 PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their
30 opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number
31 of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option,
32 --line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to
36 Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010
37 ------------------------
39 Another bug-fix release.
42 Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010
43 ------------------------
45 This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and
46 infelicities in the build system have been fixed.
49 Release 8.00 19-Oct-09
50 ----------------------
52 Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some
53 enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been
54 removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching
55 process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a
56 full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a
57 lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have
58 duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have
59 different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes.
60 The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate
61 of change is not slowing down.
67 Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions.
73 More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property
80 This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new
87 The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a
88 potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In
89 addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date.
95 This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with
96 libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been
97 added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to
101 Release 7.4 21-Sep-07
102 ---------------------
104 The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether
105 \R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF.
106 Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of
107 relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation
108 updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE
109 has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file.
112 Release 7.3 28-Aug-07
113 ---------------------
115 Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not:
117 1. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control
118 verbs" such as (*PRUNE).
120 2. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more
121 restrictive in the strings it accepts.
123 3. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a
124 consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that
125 has a limited repeat count.
127 4. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec()
128 no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match
129 fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern.
130 This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred.
132 5. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of
133 a pattern have been added.
136 Release 7.2 19-Jun-07
137 ---------------------
139 WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be
140 recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v,
143 Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is
144 wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function
145 independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the
146 functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries
147 are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the
148 pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and
149 the basic pcre library.
151 Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added:
153 (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines.
155 (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions.
157 \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>.
159 \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar
160 matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string.
162 (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative
163 start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing
164 parentheses number 1 in both cases.
166 \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively.
169 Release 7.1 24-Apr-07
170 ---------------------
172 There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of
173 PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which
174 recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks.
176 A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a
177 complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools
178 support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling
179 PCRE in a wide variety of environments.
181 NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built,
182 called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was
183 included in a single dll.
185 Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer
186 compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character
187 tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate
188 the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the
189 "configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a
190 system that uses EBCDIC code.
192 There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is
193 not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling.
196 Release 7.0 19-Dec-06
197 ---------------------
199 This release has a new major number because there have been some internal
200 upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities,
201 and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely
202 to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance.
203 Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If
204 you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to
205 re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are:
207 1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds
210 2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline
211 sequence as a newline.
213 3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit.
215 4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include
216 alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for
219 5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a
220 QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and
223 For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
226 Release 6.7 04-Jul-06
227 ---------------------
229 The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for
230 multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the
231 library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing).
233 Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been
234 significantly reduced for certain subject strings.
237 Release 6.5 01-Feb-06
238 ---------------------
240 Important changes in this release:
242 1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep.
244 2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the
245 supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic",
246 and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to
247 the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that
248 use \p or \P must be recompiled.
250 3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all
251 recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for
252 example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because
253 otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work.
255 See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug
259 Release 6.0 07-Jun-05
260 ---------------------
262 The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several
263 major new pieces of functionality.
265 A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA
266 algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases,
267 though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On
268 the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works
269 better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the
272 The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new
273 pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides.
275 The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built
276 automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this
279 The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each
280 function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static
281 linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have
282 their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They
283 are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers.
285 The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as
286 multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the
287 ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility
291 Release 5.0 13-Sep-04
292 ---------------------
294 The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more
295 conventional "BSD" licence.
297 In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes
298 in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes
299 are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The
302 1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every
303 item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position
304 in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing.
306 2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character
307 tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used
308 at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the
309 default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled
310 pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything
311 special unless you are using custom tables.
313 3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to
314 request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the
315 subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing
316 an input field as it is being typed.
318 4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which
319 means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only
320 the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this
321 support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the
322 size of the library dramatically.
324 5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later.
326 6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a
327 different host with the opposite endianness.
329 7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features.
331 The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no
332 longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This
333 makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching
334 possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a
335 result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected.
338 Release 4.5 01-Dec-03
339 ---------------------
341 Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features:
343 1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive
344 function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows
345 things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks.
347 2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to
348 check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the
349 latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET.
351 3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code.
354 Release 4.4 21-Aug-03
355 ---------------------
357 This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE
358 checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress
359 this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance.
365 Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a
369 Release 4.0 17-Feb-03
370 ---------------------
372 There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional
373 functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new
374 functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the
375 documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
377 1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes.
379 2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java
380 package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic
383 3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position
384 is at the start point of the match.
386 4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides
387 with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE
388 is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to
389 its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at
392 5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really
393 easy to get totally confused.
395 6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to
398 7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an
399 option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode.
401 8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages.
402 These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate
403 directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking
404 between the pages has been installed.
407 Release 3.5 15-Aug-01
408 ---------------------
410 1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf
411 and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS
412 supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure
413 command if you want only one of them.
415 2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is
416 useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets
417 relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so
418 there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc.
420 3. Upgrades to pcregrep:
421 (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep.
422 (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase.
423 (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories.
424 (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file.
426 4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure
427 script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix
428 systems, the value can be set in config.h.
430 5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an
431 absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and
432 likewise updated the man page.
434 6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed.
435 The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit.
438 Release 3.3 01-Aug-00
439 ---------------------
441 There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and
442 experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented.
443 Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release.
446 Release 3.0 01-Feb-00
447 ---------------------
449 1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It
450 builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script.
452 2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default.
454 3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:].
456 5. There is an experimental recursion feature.
458 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
459 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00
461 Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger
462 ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace.
463 The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support
464 some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005.
466 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00
468 Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the
469 pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it
470 possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current
471 locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new arguement
472 should be passed as NULL.
474 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05
476 Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made
477 to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been
478 added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the
479 subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man
480 page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all
481 you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a
482 value of zero. For example, change
484 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize)
486 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize)
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