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