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