Return to perltest.txt CVS log

Up to [ELWIX - Embedded LightWeight unIX -] / embedaddon / pcre / doc

8.33

    1: The perltest program
    2: --------------------
    3: 
    4: The perltest.pl script tests Perl's regular expressions; it has the same
    5: specification as pcretest, and so can be given identical input, except that
    6: input patterns can be followed only by Perl's lower case modifiers and certain
    7: other pcretest modifiers that are either handled or ignored:
    8: 
    9:   /+   recognized and handled by perltest
   10:   /++  the second + is ignored
   11:   /8   recognized and handled by perltest
   12:   /J   ignored
   13:   /K   ignored
   14:   /W   ignored
   15:   /S   ignored
   16:   /SS  ignored
   17:   /Y   ignored
   18: 
   19: The pcretest \Y escape in data lines is removed before matching. The data lines
   20: are processed as Perl double-quoted strings, so if they contain " $ or @
   21: characters, these have to be escaped. For this reason, all such characters in
   22: the Perl-compatible testinput1 file are escaped so that they can be used for
   23: perltest as well as for pcretest. The special upper case pattern modifiers such
   24: as /A that pcretest recognizes, and its special data line escapes, are not used
   25: in the Perl-compatible test file. The output should be identical, apart from
   26: the initial identifying banner.
   27: 
   28: The perltest.pl script can also test UTF-8 features. It recognizes the special
   29: modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke UTF-8 functionality. The testinput4
   30: and testinput6 files can be fed to perltest to run compatible UTF-8 tests.
   31: However, it is necessary to add "use utf8; require Encode" to the script to
   32: make this work correctly. I have not managed to find a way to handle this
   33: automatically.
   34: 
   35: The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest.pl, since
   36: they make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that pcretest
   37: uses to test certain features of PCRE. Some of these files also contain
   38: malformed regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses them
   39: correctly.
   40: 
   41: Philip Hazel
   42: January 2012