Annotation of embedaddon/pcre/NEWS, revision 1.1.1.1

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: ****

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