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