Annotation of embedaddon/pcre/NEWS, revision 1.1.1.5

1.1       misho       1: News about PCRE releases
                      2: ------------------------
                      3: 
1.1.1.5 ! misho       4: Release 8.34 15-December-2013
        !             5: -----------------------------
        !             6: 
        !             7: As well as fixing the inevitable bugs, performance has been improved by
        !             8: refactoring and extending the amount of "auto-possessification" that PCRE does.
        !             9: Other notable changes:
        !            10: 
        !            11: .  Implemented PCRE_INFO_MATCH_EMPTY, which yields 1 if the pattern can match
        !            12:    an empty string. If it can, pcretest shows this in its information output.
        !            13: 
        !            14: .  A back reference to a named subpattern when there is more than one of the
        !            15:    same name now checks them in the order in which they appear in the pattern.
        !            16:    The first one that is set is used for the reference. Previously only the
        !            17:    first one was inspected. This change makes PCRE more compatible with Perl.
        !            18: 
        !            19: .  Unicode character properties were updated from Unicode 6.3.0.
        !            20: 
        !            21: .  The character VT has been added to the set of characters that match \s and
        !            22:    are generally treated as white space, following this same change in Perl
        !            23:    5.18. There is now no difference between "Perl space" and "POSIX space".
        !            24: 
        !            25: .  Perl has changed its handling of \8 and \9. If there is no previously
        !            26:    encountered capturing group of those numbers, they are treated as the
        !            27:    literal characters 8 and 9 instead of a binary zero followed by the
        !            28:    literals. PCRE now does the same.
        !            29: 
        !            30: .  Following Perl, added \o{} to specify codepoints in octal, making it
        !            31:    possible to specify values greater than 0777 and also making them
        !            32:    unambiguous.
        !            33: 
        !            34: .  In UCP mode, \s was not matching two of the characters that Perl matches,
        !            35:    namely NEL (U+0085) and MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR (U+180E), though they
        !            36:    were matched by \h.
        !            37: 
        !            38: .  Add JIT support for the 64 bit TileGX architecture.
        !            39: 
        !            40: .  Upgraded the handling of the POSIX classes [:graph:], [:print:], and
        !            41:    [:punct:] when PCRE_UCP is set so as to include the same characters as Perl
        !            42:    does in Unicode mode.
        !            43: 
        !            44: .  Perl no longer allows group names to start with digits, so I have made this
        !            45:    change also in PCRE.
        !            46: 
        !            47: .  Added support for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] as used in the BSD POSIX library to
        !            48:    mean "start of word" and "end of word", respectively, as a transition aid.
        !            49: 
        !            50: 
1.1.1.4   misho      51: Release 8.33 28-May-2013
                     52: --------------------------
                     53: 
                     54: A number of bugs are fixed, and some performance improvements have been made.
                     55: There are also some new features, of which these are the most important:
                     56: 
                     57: .  The behaviour of the backtracking verbs has been rationalized and
                     58:    documented in more detail.
                     59: 
                     60: .  JIT now supports callouts and all of the backtracking verbs.
                     61: 
                     62: .  Unicode validation has been updated in the light of Unicode Corrigendum #9,
                     63:    which points out that "non characters" are not "characters that may not
                     64:    appear in Unicode strings" but rather "characters that are reserved for
                     65:    internal use and have only local meaning".
                     66: 
                     67: .  (*LIMIT_MATCH=d) and (*LIMIT_RECURSION=d) have been added so that the
                     68:    creator of a pattern can specify lower (but not higher) limits for the
                     69:    matching process.
                     70: 
                     71: .  The PCRE_NEVER_UTF option is available to prevent pattern-writers from using
                     72:    the (*UTF) feature, as this could be a security issue.
                     73: 
                     74: 
                     75: Release 8.32 30-November-2012
                     76: -----------------------------
                     77: 
                     78: This release fixes a number of bugs, but also has some new features. These are
                     79: the highlights:
                     80: 
                     81: .  There is now support for 32-bit character strings and UTF-32. Like the
                     82:    16-bit support, this is done by compiling a separate 32-bit library.
                     83: 
                     84: .  \X now matches a Unicode extended grapheme cluster.
                     85: 
                     86: .  Case-independent matching of Unicode characters that have more than one
                     87:    "other case" now makes all three (or more) characters equivalent. This
                     88:    applies, for example, to Greek Sigma, which has two lowercase versions.
                     89: 
                     90: .  Unicode character properties are updated to Unicode 6.2.0.
                     91: 
                     92: .  The EBCDIC support, which had decayed, has had a spring clean.
                     93: 
                     94: .  A number of JIT optimizations have been added, which give faster JIT
                     95:    execution speed. In addition, a new direct interface to JIT execution is
                     96:    available. This bypasses some of the sanity checks of pcre_exec() to give a
                     97:    noticeable speed-up.
                     98: 
                     99: .  A number of issues in pcregrep have been fixed, making it more compatible
                    100:    with GNU grep. In particular, --exclude and --include (and variants) apply
                    101:    to all files now, not just those obtained from scanning a directory
                    102:    recursively. In Windows environments, the default action for directories is
                    103:    now "skip" instead of "read" (which provokes an error).
                    104: 
                    105: .  If the --only-matching (-o) option in pcregrep is specified multiple
                    106:    times, each one causes appropriate output. For example, -o1 -o2 outputs the
                    107:    substrings matched by the 1st and 2nd capturing parentheses. A separating
                    108:    string can be specified by --om-separator (default empty).
                    109: 
                    110: .  When PCRE is built via Autotools using a version of gcc that has the
                    111:    "visibility" feature, it is used to hide internal library functions that are
                    112:    not part of the public API.
                    113: 
                    114: 
1.1.1.3   misho     115: Release 8.31 06-July-2012
                    116: -------------------------
                    117: 
                    118: This is mainly a bug-fixing release, with a small number of developments:
                    119: 
                    120: . The JIT compiler now supports partial matching and the (*MARK) and
                    121:   (*COMMIT) verbs.
                    122: 
1.1.1.4   misho     123: . PCRE_INFO_MAXLOOKBEHIND can be used to find the longest lookbehind in a
1.1.1.3   misho     124:   pattern.
                    125: 
                    126: . There should be a performance improvement when using the heap instead of the
                    127:   stack for recursion.
                    128: 
                    129: . pcregrep can now be linked with libedit as an alternative to libreadline.
                    130: 
                    131: . pcregrep now has a --file-list option where the list of files to scan is
                    132:   given as a file.
                    133: 
                    134: . pcregrep now recognizes binary files and there are related options.
                    135: 
                    136: . The Unicode tables have been updated to 6.1.0.
                    137: 
                    138: As always, the full list of changes is in the ChangeLog file.
                    139: 
                    140: 
1.1.1.2   misho     141: Release 8.30 04-February-2012
                    142: -----------------------------
                    143: 
                    144: Release 8.30 introduces a major new feature: support for 16-bit character
                    145: strings, compiled as a separate library. There are a few changes to the
                    146: 8-bit library, in addition to some bug fixes.
                    147: 
                    148: . The pcre_info() function, which has been obsolete for over 10 years, has
                    149:   been removed.
                    150: 
                    151: . When a compiled pattern was saved to a file and later reloaded on a host
                    152:   with different endianness, PCRE used automatically to swap the bytes in some
                    153:   of the data fields. With the advent of the 16-bit library, where more of this
                    154:   swapping is needed, it is no longer done automatically. Instead, the bad
                    155:   endianness is detected and a specific error is given. The user can then call
                    156:   a new function called pcre_pattern_to_host_byte_order() (or an equivalent
                    157:   16-bit function) to do the swap.
                    158: 
                    159: . In UTF-8 mode, the values 0xd800 to 0xdfff are not legal Unicode
                    160:   code points and are now faulted. (They are the so-called "surrogates"
                    161:   that are reserved for coding high values in UTF-16.)
                    162: 
                    163: 
1.1       misho     164: Release 8.21 12-Dec-2011
                    165: ------------------------
                    166: 
                    167: This is almost entirely a bug-fix release. The only new feature is the ability
                    168: to obtain the size of the memory used by the JIT compiler.
                    169: 
                    170: 
                    171: Release 8.20 21-Oct-2011
                    172: ------------------------
                    173: 
                    174: The main change in this release is the inclusion of Zoltan Herczeg's
                    175: just-in-time compiler support, which can be accessed by building PCRE with
                    176: --enable-jit. Large performance benefits can be had in many situations. 8.20
                    177: also fixes an unfortunate bug that was introduced in 8.13 as well as tidying up
                    178: a number of infelicities and differences from Perl.
                    179: 
                    180: 
                    181: Release 8.13 16-Aug-2011
                    182: ------------------------
                    183: 
                    184: This is mainly a bug-fix release. There has been a lot of internal refactoring.
                    185: The Unicode tables have been updated. The only new feature in the library is
                    186: the passing of *MARK information to callouts. Some additions have been made to
                    187: pcretest to make testing easier and more comprehensive. There is a new option
                    188: for pcregrep to adjust its internal buffer size.
                    189: 
                    190: 
                    191: Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011
                    192: ------------------------
                    193: 
                    194: This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail
                    195: on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library.
                    196: 
                    197: 
                    198: Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010
                    199: ------------------------
                    200: 
                    201: A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see
                    202: ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes:
                    203: 
                    204: . Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep.
                    205: 
                    206: . Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options
                    207:   of pcregrep.
                    208: 
                    209: . Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and
                    210:   \B.
                    211: 
                    212: . Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a
                    213:   bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD.
                    214: 
                    215: . Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_
                    216:   START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time
                    217: 
                    218: 
                    219: Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010
                    220: ------------------------
                    221: 
                    222: There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option
                    223: PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their
                    224: opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number
                    225: of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option,
                    226: --line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to
                    227: pipes.
                    228: 
                    229: 
                    230: Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010
                    231: ------------------------
                    232: 
                    233: Another bug-fix release.
                    234: 
                    235: 
                    236: Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010
                    237: ------------------------
                    238: 
                    239: This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and
                    240: infelicities in the build system have been fixed.
                    241: 
                    242: 
                    243: Release 8.00 19-Oct-09
                    244: ----------------------
                    245: 
                    246: Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some
                    247: enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been
                    248: removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching
                    249: process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a
                    250: full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a
                    251: lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have
                    252: duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have
                    253: different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes.
                    254: The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate
                    255: of change is not slowing down.
                    256: 
                    257: 
                    258: Release 7.9 11-Apr-09
                    259: ---------------------
                    260: 
                    261: Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions.
                    262: 
                    263: 
                    264: Release 7.8 05-Sep-08
                    265: ---------------------
                    266: 
                    267: More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property
                    268: lookup.
                    269: 
                    270: 
                    271: Release 7.7 07-May-08
                    272: ---------------------
                    273: 
                    274: This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new
                    275: features.
                    276: 
                    277: 
                    278: Release 7.6 28-Jan-08
                    279: ---------------------
                    280: 
                    281: The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a
                    282: potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In
                    283: addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date.
                    284: 
                    285: 
                    286: Release 7.5 10-Jan-08
                    287: ---------------------
                    288: 
                    289: This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with
                    290: libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been
                    291: added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to
                    292: pcregrep.
                    293: 
                    294: 
                    295: Release 7.4 21-Sep-07
                    296: ---------------------
                    297: 
                    298: The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether
                    299: \R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF.
                    300: Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of
                    301: relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation
                    302: updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE
                    303: has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file.
                    304: 
                    305: 
                    306: Release 7.3 28-Aug-07
                    307: ---------------------
                    308: 
                    309: Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not:
                    310: 
                    311: 1. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control
                    312:    verbs" such as (*PRUNE).
                    313: 
                    314: 2. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more
                    315:    restrictive in the strings it accepts.
                    316: 
                    317: 3. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a
                    318:    consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that
                    319:    has a limited repeat count.
                    320: 
                    321: 4. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec()
                    322:    no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match
                    323:    fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern.
                    324:    This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred.
                    325: 
                    326: 5. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of
                    327:    a pattern have been added.
                    328: 
                    329: 
                    330: Release 7.2 19-Jun-07
                    331: ---------------------
                    332: 
                    333: WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be
                    334: recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v,
                    335: and \V).
                    336: 
                    337: Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is
                    338: wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function
                    339: independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the
                    340: functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries
                    341: are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the
                    342: pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and
                    343: the basic pcre library.
                    344: 
                    345: Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added:
                    346: 
                    347:   (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines.
                    348: 
                    349:   (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions.
                    350: 
                    351:   \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>.
                    352: 
                    353:   \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar
                    354:   matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string.
                    355: 
                    356:   (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative
                    357:   start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing
                    358:   parentheses number 1 in both cases.
                    359: 
                    360:   \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively.
                    361: 
                    362: 
                    363: Release 7.1 24-Apr-07
                    364: ---------------------
                    365: 
                    366: There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of
                    367: PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which
                    368: recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks.
                    369: 
                    370: A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a
                    371: complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools
                    372: support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling
                    373: PCRE in a wide variety of environments.
                    374: 
                    375: NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built,
                    376: called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was
                    377: included in a single dll.
                    378: 
                    379: Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer
                    380: compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character
                    381: tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate
                    382: the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the
                    383: "configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a
                    384: system that uses EBCDIC code.
                    385: 
                    386: There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is
                    387: not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling.
                    388: 
                    389: 
                    390: Release 7.0 19-Dec-06
                    391: ---------------------
                    392: 
                    393: This release has a new major number because there have been some internal
                    394: upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities,
                    395: and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely
                    396: to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance.
                    397: Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If
                    398: you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to
                    399: re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are:
                    400: 
                    401: 1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds
                    402:    some more scripts.
                    403: 
                    404: 2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline
                    405:    sequence as a newline.
                    406: 
                    407: 3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit.
                    408: 
                    409: 4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include
                    410:    alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for
                    411:    recursion.
                    412: 
                    413: 5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a
                    414:    QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and
                    415:    assignment.
                    416: 
                    417: For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
                    418: 
                    419: 
                    420: Release 6.7 04-Jul-06
                    421: ---------------------
                    422: 
                    423: The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for
                    424: multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the
                    425: library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing).
                    426: 
                    427: Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been
                    428: significantly reduced for certain subject strings.
                    429: 
                    430: 
                    431: Release 6.5 01-Feb-06
                    432: ---------------------
                    433: 
                    434: Important changes in this release:
                    435: 
                    436: 1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep.
                    437: 
                    438: 2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the
                    439:    supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic",
                    440:    and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to
                    441:    the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that
                    442:    use \p or \P must be recompiled.
                    443: 
                    444: 3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all
                    445:    recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for
                    446:    example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because
                    447:    otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work.
                    448: 
                    449: See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug
                    450: fixes and tidies.
                    451: 
                    452: 
                    453: Release 6.0 07-Jun-05
                    454: ---------------------
                    455: 
                    456: The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several
                    457: major new pieces of functionality.
                    458: 
                    459: A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA
                    460: algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases,
                    461: though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On
                    462: the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works
                    463: better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the
                    464: differences.
                    465: 
                    466: The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new
                    467: pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides.
                    468: 
                    469: The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built
                    470: automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this
                    471: interface.
                    472: 
                    473: The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each
                    474: function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static
                    475: linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have
                    476: their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They
                    477: are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers.
                    478: 
                    479: The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as
                    480: multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the
                    481: ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility
                    482: programs.
                    483: 
                    484: 
                    485: Release 5.0 13-Sep-04
                    486: ---------------------
                    487: 
                    488: The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more
                    489: conventional "BSD" licence.
                    490: 
                    491: In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes
                    492: in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes
                    493: are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The
                    494: new features are:
                    495: 
                    496: 1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every
                    497:    item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position
                    498:    in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing.
                    499: 
                    500: 2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character
                    501:    tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used
                    502:    at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the
                    503:    default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled
                    504:    pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything
                    505:    special unless you are using custom tables.
                    506: 
                    507: 3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to
                    508:    request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the
                    509:    subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing
                    510:    an input field as it is being typed.
                    511: 
                    512: 4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which
                    513:    means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only
                    514:    the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this
                    515:    support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the
                    516:    size of the library dramatically.
                    517: 
                    518: 5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later.
                    519: 
                    520: 6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a
                    521:    different host with the opposite endianness.
                    522: 
                    523: 7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features.
                    524: 
                    525: The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no
                    526: longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This
                    527: makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching
                    528: possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a
                    529: result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected.
                    530: 
                    531: 
                    532: Release 4.5 01-Dec-03
                    533: ---------------------
                    534: 
                    535: Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features:
                    536: 
                    537: 1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive
                    538: function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows
                    539: things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks.
                    540: 
                    541: 2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to
                    542: check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the
                    543: latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET.
                    544: 
                    545: 3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code.
                    546: 
                    547: 
                    548: Release 4.4 21-Aug-03
                    549: ---------------------
                    550: 
                    551: This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE
                    552: checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress
                    553: this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance.
                    554: 
                    555: 
                    556: Releases 4.1 - 4.3
                    557: ------------------
                    558: 
                    559: Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a
                    560: look at ChangeLog.
                    561: 
                    562: 
                    563: Release 4.0 17-Feb-03
                    564: ---------------------
                    565: 
                    566: There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional
                    567: functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new
                    568: functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the
                    569: documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
                    570: 
                    571: 1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes.
                    572: 
                    573: 2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java
                    574: package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic
                    575: grouping".
                    576: 
                    577: 3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position
                    578: is at the start point of the match.
                    579: 
                    580: 4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides
                    581: with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE
                    582: is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to
                    583: its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at
                    584: appropriate points.
                    585: 
                    586: 5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really
                    587: easy to get totally confused.
                    588: 
                    589: 6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to
                    590: name a group.
                    591: 
                    592: 7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an
                    593: option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode.
                    594: 
                    595: 8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages.
                    596: These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate
                    597: directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking
                    598: between the pages has been installed.
                    599: 
                    600: 
                    601: Release 3.5 15-Aug-01
                    602: ---------------------
                    603: 
                    604: 1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf
                    605: and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS
                    606: supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure
                    607: command if you want only one of them.
                    608: 
                    609: 2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is
                    610: useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets
                    611: relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so
                    612: there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc.
                    613: 
                    614: 3. Upgrades to pcregrep:
                    615:    (i)   Added long-form option names like gnu grep.
                    616:    (ii)  Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase.
                    617:    (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories.
                    618:    (iv)  Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file.
                    619: 
                    620: 4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure
                    621: script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix
                    622: systems, the value can be set in config.h.
                    623: 
                    624: 5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an
                    625: absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and
                    626: likewise updated the man page.
                    627: 
                    628: 6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed.
                    629: The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit.
                    630: 
                    631: 
                    632: Release 3.3 01-Aug-00
                    633: ---------------------
                    634: 
                    635: There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and
                    636: experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented.
                    637: Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release.
                    638: 
                    639: 
                    640: Release 3.0 01-Feb-00
                    641: ---------------------
                    642: 
                    643: 1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It
                    644: builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script.
                    645: 
                    646: 2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default.
                    647: 
                    648: 3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:].
                    649: 
                    650: 5. There is an experimental recursion feature.
                    651: 
                    652: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                    653:           IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00
                    654: 
                    655: Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger
                    656: ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace.
                    657: The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support
                    658: some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005.
                    659: 
                    660:           IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00
                    661: 
                    662: Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the
                    663: pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it
                    664: possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current
1.1.1.4   misho     665: locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new argument
1.1       misho     666: should be passed as NULL.
                    667: 
                    668:           IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05
                    669: 
                    670: Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made
                    671: to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been
                    672: added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the
                    673: subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man
                    674: page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all
                    675: you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a
                    676: value of zero. For example, change
                    677: 
                    678:   pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize)
                    679: to
                    680:   pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize)
                    681: 
                    682: ****

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