Annotation of embedaddon/pcre/NEWS, revision 1.1
1.1 ! misho 1: News about PCRE releases
! 2: ------------------------
! 3:
! 4: Release 8.21 12-Dec-2011
! 5: ------------------------
! 6:
! 7: This is almost entirely a bug-fix release. The only new feature is the ability
! 8: to obtain the size of the memory used by the JIT compiler.
! 9:
! 10:
! 11: Release 8.20 21-Oct-2011
! 12: ------------------------
! 13:
! 14: The main change in this release is the inclusion of Zoltan Herczeg's
! 15: just-in-time compiler support, which can be accessed by building PCRE with
! 16: --enable-jit. Large performance benefits can be had in many situations. 8.20
! 17: also fixes an unfortunate bug that was introduced in 8.13 as well as tidying up
! 18: a number of infelicities and differences from Perl.
! 19:
! 20:
! 21: Release 8.13 16-Aug-2011
! 22: ------------------------
! 23:
! 24: This is mainly a bug-fix release. There has been a lot of internal refactoring.
! 25: The Unicode tables have been updated. The only new feature in the library is
! 26: the passing of *MARK information to callouts. Some additions have been made to
! 27: pcretest to make testing easier and more comprehensive. There is a new option
! 28: for pcregrep to adjust its internal buffer size.
! 29:
! 30:
! 31: Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011
! 32: ------------------------
! 33:
! 34: This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail
! 35: on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library.
! 36:
! 37:
! 38: Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010
! 39: ------------------------
! 40:
! 41: A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see
! 42: ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes:
! 43:
! 44: . Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep.
! 45:
! 46: . Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options
! 47: of pcregrep.
! 48:
! 49: . Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and
! 50: \B.
! 51:
! 52: . Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a
! 53: bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD.
! 54:
! 55: . Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_
! 56: START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time
! 57:
! 58:
! 59: Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010
! 60: ------------------------
! 61:
! 62: There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option
! 63: PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their
! 64: opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number
! 65: of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option,
! 66: --line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to
! 67: pipes.
! 68:
! 69:
! 70: Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010
! 71: ------------------------
! 72:
! 73: Another bug-fix release.
! 74:
! 75:
! 76: Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010
! 77: ------------------------
! 78:
! 79: This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and
! 80: infelicities in the build system have been fixed.
! 81:
! 82:
! 83: Release 8.00 19-Oct-09
! 84: ----------------------
! 85:
! 86: Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some
! 87: enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been
! 88: removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching
! 89: process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a
! 90: full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a
! 91: lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have
! 92: duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have
! 93: different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes.
! 94: The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate
! 95: of change is not slowing down.
! 96:
! 97:
! 98: Release 7.9 11-Apr-09
! 99: ---------------------
! 100:
! 101: Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions.
! 102:
! 103:
! 104: Release 7.8 05-Sep-08
! 105: ---------------------
! 106:
! 107: More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property
! 108: lookup.
! 109:
! 110:
! 111: Release 7.7 07-May-08
! 112: ---------------------
! 113:
! 114: This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new
! 115: features.
! 116:
! 117:
! 118: Release 7.6 28-Jan-08
! 119: ---------------------
! 120:
! 121: The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a
! 122: potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In
! 123: addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date.
! 124:
! 125:
! 126: Release 7.5 10-Jan-08
! 127: ---------------------
! 128:
! 129: This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with
! 130: libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been
! 131: added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to
! 132: pcregrep.
! 133:
! 134:
! 135: Release 7.4 21-Sep-07
! 136: ---------------------
! 137:
! 138: The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether
! 139: \R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF.
! 140: Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of
! 141: relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation
! 142: updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE
! 143: has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file.
! 144:
! 145:
! 146: Release 7.3 28-Aug-07
! 147: ---------------------
! 148:
! 149: Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not:
! 150:
! 151: 1. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control
! 152: verbs" such as (*PRUNE).
! 153:
! 154: 2. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more
! 155: restrictive in the strings it accepts.
! 156:
! 157: 3. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a
! 158: consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that
! 159: has a limited repeat count.
! 160:
! 161: 4. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec()
! 162: no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match
! 163: fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern.
! 164: This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred.
! 165:
! 166: 5. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of
! 167: a pattern have been added.
! 168:
! 169:
! 170: Release 7.2 19-Jun-07
! 171: ---------------------
! 172:
! 173: WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be
! 174: recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v,
! 175: and \V).
! 176:
! 177: Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is
! 178: wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function
! 179: independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the
! 180: functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries
! 181: are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the
! 182: pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and
! 183: the basic pcre library.
! 184:
! 185: Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added:
! 186:
! 187: (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines.
! 188:
! 189: (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions.
! 190:
! 191: \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>.
! 192:
! 193: \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar
! 194: matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string.
! 195:
! 196: (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative
! 197: start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing
! 198: parentheses number 1 in both cases.
! 199:
! 200: \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively.
! 201:
! 202:
! 203: Release 7.1 24-Apr-07
! 204: ---------------------
! 205:
! 206: There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of
! 207: PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which
! 208: recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks.
! 209:
! 210: A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a
! 211: complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools
! 212: support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling
! 213: PCRE in a wide variety of environments.
! 214:
! 215: NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built,
! 216: called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was
! 217: included in a single dll.
! 218:
! 219: Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer
! 220: compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character
! 221: tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate
! 222: the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the
! 223: "configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a
! 224: system that uses EBCDIC code.
! 225:
! 226: There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is
! 227: not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling.
! 228:
! 229:
! 230: Release 7.0 19-Dec-06
! 231: ---------------------
! 232:
! 233: This release has a new major number because there have been some internal
! 234: upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities,
! 235: and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely
! 236: to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance.
! 237: Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If
! 238: you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to
! 239: re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are:
! 240:
! 241: 1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds
! 242: some more scripts.
! 243:
! 244: 2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline
! 245: sequence as a newline.
! 246:
! 247: 3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit.
! 248:
! 249: 4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include
! 250: alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for
! 251: recursion.
! 252:
! 253: 5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a
! 254: QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and
! 255: assignment.
! 256:
! 257: For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
! 258:
! 259:
! 260: Release 6.7 04-Jul-06
! 261: ---------------------
! 262:
! 263: The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for
! 264: multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the
! 265: library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing).
! 266:
! 267: Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been
! 268: significantly reduced for certain subject strings.
! 269:
! 270:
! 271: Release 6.5 01-Feb-06
! 272: ---------------------
! 273:
! 274: Important changes in this release:
! 275:
! 276: 1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep.
! 277:
! 278: 2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the
! 279: supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic",
! 280: and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to
! 281: the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that
! 282: use \p or \P must be recompiled.
! 283:
! 284: 3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all
! 285: recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for
! 286: example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because
! 287: otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work.
! 288:
! 289: See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug
! 290: fixes and tidies.
! 291:
! 292:
! 293: Release 6.0 07-Jun-05
! 294: ---------------------
! 295:
! 296: The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several
! 297: major new pieces of functionality.
! 298:
! 299: A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA
! 300: algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases,
! 301: though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On
! 302: the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works
! 303: better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the
! 304: differences.
! 305:
! 306: The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new
! 307: pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides.
! 308:
! 309: The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built
! 310: automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this
! 311: interface.
! 312:
! 313: The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each
! 314: function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static
! 315: linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have
! 316: their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They
! 317: are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers.
! 318:
! 319: The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as
! 320: multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the
! 321: ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility
! 322: programs.
! 323:
! 324:
! 325: Release 5.0 13-Sep-04
! 326: ---------------------
! 327:
! 328: The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more
! 329: conventional "BSD" licence.
! 330:
! 331: In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes
! 332: in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes
! 333: are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The
! 334: new features are:
! 335:
! 336: 1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every
! 337: item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position
! 338: in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing.
! 339:
! 340: 2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character
! 341: tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used
! 342: at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the
! 343: default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled
! 344: pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything
! 345: special unless you are using custom tables.
! 346:
! 347: 3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to
! 348: request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the
! 349: subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing
! 350: an input field as it is being typed.
! 351:
! 352: 4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which
! 353: means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only
! 354: the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this
! 355: support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the
! 356: size of the library dramatically.
! 357:
! 358: 5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later.
! 359:
! 360: 6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a
! 361: different host with the opposite endianness.
! 362:
! 363: 7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features.
! 364:
! 365: The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no
! 366: longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This
! 367: makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching
! 368: possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a
! 369: result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected.
! 370:
! 371:
! 372: Release 4.5 01-Dec-03
! 373: ---------------------
! 374:
! 375: Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features:
! 376:
! 377: 1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive
! 378: function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows
! 379: things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks.
! 380:
! 381: 2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to
! 382: check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the
! 383: latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET.
! 384:
! 385: 3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code.
! 386:
! 387:
! 388: Release 4.4 21-Aug-03
! 389: ---------------------
! 390:
! 391: This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE
! 392: checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress
! 393: this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance.
! 394:
! 395:
! 396: Releases 4.1 - 4.3
! 397: ------------------
! 398:
! 399: Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a
! 400: look at ChangeLog.
! 401:
! 402:
! 403: Release 4.0 17-Feb-03
! 404: ---------------------
! 405:
! 406: There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional
! 407: functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new
! 408: functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the
! 409: documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
! 410:
! 411: 1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes.
! 412:
! 413: 2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java
! 414: package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic
! 415: grouping".
! 416:
! 417: 3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position
! 418: is at the start point of the match.
! 419:
! 420: 4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides
! 421: with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE
! 422: is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to
! 423: its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at
! 424: appropriate points.
! 425:
! 426: 5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really
! 427: easy to get totally confused.
! 428:
! 429: 6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to
! 430: name a group.
! 431:
! 432: 7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an
! 433: option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode.
! 434:
! 435: 8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages.
! 436: These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate
! 437: directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking
! 438: between the pages has been installed.
! 439:
! 440:
! 441: Release 3.5 15-Aug-01
! 442: ---------------------
! 443:
! 444: 1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf
! 445: and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS
! 446: supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure
! 447: command if you want only one of them.
! 448:
! 449: 2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is
! 450: useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets
! 451: relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so
! 452: there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc.
! 453:
! 454: 3. Upgrades to pcregrep:
! 455: (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep.
! 456: (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase.
! 457: (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories.
! 458: (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file.
! 459:
! 460: 4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure
! 461: script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix
! 462: systems, the value can be set in config.h.
! 463:
! 464: 5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an
! 465: absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and
! 466: likewise updated the man page.
! 467:
! 468: 6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed.
! 469: The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit.
! 470:
! 471:
! 472: Release 3.3 01-Aug-00
! 473: ---------------------
! 474:
! 475: There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and
! 476: experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented.
! 477: Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release.
! 478:
! 479:
! 480: Release 3.0 01-Feb-00
! 481: ---------------------
! 482:
! 483: 1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It
! 484: builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script.
! 485:
! 486: 2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default.
! 487:
! 488: 3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:].
! 489:
! 490: 5. There is an experimental recursion feature.
! 491:
! 492: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
! 493: IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00
! 494:
! 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:
! 500: IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00
! 501:
! 502: Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the
! 503: pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it
! 504: possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current
! 505: locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new arguement
! 506: should be passed as NULL.
! 507:
! 508: IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05
! 509:
! 510: Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made
! 511: to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been
! 512: added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the
! 513: subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man
! 514: page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all
! 515: you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a
! 516: value of zero. For example, change
! 517:
! 518: pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize)
! 519: to
! 520: pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize)
! 521:
! 522: ****
FreeBSD-CVSweb <freebsd-cvsweb@FreeBSD.org>