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