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pcre

    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: 
   18: The data lines are processed as Perl double-quoted strings, so if they contain
   19: " $ or @ characters, these have to be escaped. For this reason, all such
   20: characters in testinput1, testinput4, testinput6, and testinput11 are escaped
   21: so that they can be used for perltest as well as for pcretest. The pcretest \Y
   22: escape in data lines is removed.
   23: 
   24: The special upper case pattern modifiers such as /A that pcretest recognizes,
   25: and its special data line escapes, are not used in these files. The output
   26: should be identical, apart from 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;" to the script to make this work
   32: correctly.
   33: 
   34: The testinput11 file contains tests that use features of Perl 5.10, so does not
   35: work with Perl 5.8.
   36: 
   37: The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest.pl, since
   38: they make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that pcretest
   39: uses to test some features of PCRE. Some of these files also contains malformed
   40: regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses them correctly.
   41: 
   42: Philip Hazel
   43: August 2011