pcrebuild man page

Return to the PCRE index page.

This page is part of the PCRE HTML documentation. It was generated automatically from the original man page. If there is any nonsense in it, please consult the man page, in case the conversion went wrong.

• BUILDING PCRE
• PCRE BUILD-TIME OPTIONS
• BUILDING 8-BIT, 16-BIT AND 32-BIT LIBRARIES
• BUILDING SHARED AND STATIC LIBRARIES
• C++ SUPPORT
• UTF-8, UTF-16 AND UTF-32 SUPPORT
• UNICODE CHARACTER PROPERTY SUPPORT
• JUST-IN-TIME COMPILER SUPPORT
• CODE VALUE OF NEWLINE
• WHAT \R MATCHES
• POSIX MALLOC USAGE
• HANDLING VERY LARGE PATTERNS
• AVOIDING EXCESSIVE STACK USAGE
• LIMITING PCRE RESOURCE USAGE
• CREATING CHARACTER TABLES AT BUILD TIME
• USING EBCDIC CODE
• PCREGREP OPTIONS FOR COMPRESSED FILE SUPPORT
• PCREGREP BUFFER SIZE
• PCRETEST OPTION FOR LIBREADLINE SUPPORT
• DEBUGGING WITH VALGRIND SUPPORT
• CODE COVERAGE REPORTING
• SEE ALSO
• AUTHOR
• REVISION

PCRE is distributed with a configure script that can be used to build the library in Unix-like environments using the applications known as Autotools. Also in the distribution are files to support building using CMake instead of configure. The text file README contains general information about building with Autotools (some of which is repeated below), and also has some comments about building on various operating systems. There is a lot more information about building PCRE without using Autotools (including information about using CMake and building "by hand") in the text file called NON-AUTOTOOLS-BUILD. You should consult this file as well as the README file if you are building in a non-Unix-like environment.

The rest of this document describes the optional features of PCRE that can be selected when the library is compiled. It assumes use of the configure script, where the optional features are selected or deselected by providing options to configure before running the make command. However, the same options can be selected in both Unix-like and non-Unix-like environments using the GUI facility of cmake-gui if you are using CMake instead of configure to build PCRE.

If you are not using Autotools or CMake, option selection can be done by editing the config.h file, or by passing parameter settings to the compiler, as described in NON-AUTOTOOLS-BUILD.

The complete list of options for configure (which includes the standard ones such as the selection of the installation directory) can be obtained by running

  ./configure --help

By default, a library called libpcre is built, containing functions that take string arguments contained in vectors of bytes, either as single-byte characters, or interpreted as UTF-8 strings. You can also build a separate library, called libpcre16, in which strings are contained in vectors of 16-bit data units and interpreted either as single-unit characters or UTF-16 strings, by adding

  --enable-pcre16

  --enable-pcre32

  --disable-pcre8

The Autotools PCRE building process uses libtool to build both shared and static libraries by default. You can suppress one of these by adding one of

  --disable-shared
  --disable-static

By default, if the 8-bit library is being built, the configure script will search for a C++ compiler and C++ header files. If it finds them, it automatically builds the C++ wrapper library (which supports only 8-bit strings). You can disable this by adding

  --disable-cpp

To build PCRE with support for UTF Unicode character strings, add

  --enable-utf

Of itself, this setting does not make PCRE treat strings as UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32. As well as compiling PCRE with this option, you also have have to set the PCRE_UTF8, PCRE_UTF16 or PCRE_UTF32 option (as appropriate) when you call one of the pattern compiling functions.

If you set --enable-utf when compiling in an EBCDIC environment, PCRE expects its input to be either ASCII or UTF-8 (depending on the run-time option). It is not possible to support both EBCDIC and UTF-8 codes in the same version of the library. Consequently, --enable-utf and --enable-ebcdic are mutually exclusive.

UTF support allows the libraries to process character codepoints up to 0x10ffff in the strings that they handle. On its own, however, it does not provide any facilities for accessing the properties of such characters. If you want to be able to use the pattern escapes \P, \p, and \X, which refer to Unicode character properties, you must add

  --enable-unicode-properties

Including Unicode property support adds around 30K of tables to the PCRE library. Only the general category properties such as Lu and Nd are supported. Details are given in the pcrepattern documentation.

Just-in-time compiler support is included in the build by specifying

  --enable-jit

  --disable-pcregrep-jit

By default, PCRE interprets the linefeed (LF) character as indicating the end of a line. This is the normal newline character on Unix-like systems. You can compile PCRE to use carriage return (CR) instead, by adding

  --enable-newline-is-cr

  --enable-newline-is-crlf

  --enable-newline-is-anycrlf

  --enable-newline-is-any

Whatever line ending convention is selected when PCRE is built can be overridden when the library functions are called. At build time it is conventional to use the standard for your operating system.

By default, the sequence \R in a pattern matches any Unicode newline sequence, whatever has been selected as the line ending sequence. If you specify

  --enable-bsr-anycrlf

When the 8-bit library is called through the POSIX interface (see the pcreposix documentation), additional working storage is required for holding the pointers to capturing substrings, because PCRE requires three integers per substring, whereas the POSIX interface provides only two. If the number of expected substrings is small, the wrapper function uses space on the stack, because this is faster than using malloc() for each call. The default threshold above which the stack is no longer used is 10; it can be changed by adding a setting such as

  --with-posix-malloc-threshold=20

Within a compiled pattern, offset values are used to point from one part to another (for example, from an opening parenthesis to an alternation metacharacter). By default, in the 8-bit and 16-bit libraries, two-byte values are used for these offsets, leading to a maximum size for a compiled pattern of around 64K. This is sufficient to handle all but the most gigantic patterns. Nevertheless, some people do want to process truly enormous patterns, so it is possible to compile PCRE to use three-byte or four-byte offsets by adding a setting such as

  --with-link-size=3

When matching with the pcre_exec() function, PCRE implements backtracking by making recursive calls to an internal function called match(). In environments where the size of the stack is limited, this can severely limit PCRE's operation. (The Unix environment does not usually suffer from this problem, but it may sometimes be necessary to increase the maximum stack size. There is a discussion in the pcrestack documentation.) An alternative approach to recursion that uses memory from the heap to remember data, instead of using recursive function calls, has been implemented to work round the problem of limited stack size. If you want to build a version of PCRE that works this way, add

  --disable-stack-for-recursion

Separate functions are provided rather than using pcre_malloc and pcre_free because the usage is very predictable: the block sizes requested are always the same, and the blocks are always freed in reverse order. A calling program might be able to implement optimized functions that perform better than malloc() and free(). PCRE runs noticeably more slowly when built in this way. This option affects only the pcre_exec() function; it is not relevant for pcre_dfa_exec().

Internally, PCRE has a function called match(), which it calls repeatedly (sometimes recursively) when matching a pattern with the pcre_exec() function. By controlling the maximum number of times this function may be called during a single matching operation, a limit can be placed on the resources used by a single call to pcre_exec(). The limit can be changed at run time, as described in the pcreapi documentation. The default is 10 million, but this can be changed by adding a setting such as

  --with-match-limit=500000

In some environments it is desirable to limit the depth of recursive calls of match() more strictly than the total number of calls, in order to restrict the maximum amount of stack (or heap, if --disable-stack-for-recursion is specified) that is used. A second limit controls this; it defaults to the value that is set for --with-match-limit, which imposes no additional constraints. However, you can set a lower limit by adding, for example,

  --with-match-limit-recursion=10000

PCRE uses fixed tables for processing characters whose code values are less than 256. By default, PCRE is built with a set of tables that are distributed in the file pcre_chartables.c.dist. These tables are for ASCII codes only. If you add

  --enable-rebuild-chartables

PCRE assumes by default that it will run in an environment where the character code is ASCII (or Unicode, which is a superset of ASCII). This is the case for most computer operating systems. PCRE can, however, be compiled to run in an EBCDIC environment by adding

  --enable-ebcdic

The EBCDIC character that corresponds to an ASCII LF is assumed to have the value 0x15 by default. However, in some EBCDIC environments, 0x25 is used. In such an environment you should use

  --enable-ebcdic-nl25

The options that select newline behaviour, such as --enable-newline-is-cr, and equivalent run-time options, refer to these character values in an EBCDIC environment.

By default, pcregrep reads all files as plain text. You can build it so that it recognizes files whose names end in .gz or .bz2, and reads them with libz or libbz2, respectively, by adding one or both of

  --enable-pcregrep-libz
  --enable-pcregrep-libbz2

pcregrep uses an internal buffer to hold a "window" on the file it is scanning, in order to be able to output "before" and "after" lines when it finds a match. The size of the buffer is controlled by a parameter whose default value is 20K. The buffer itself is three times this size, but because of the way it is used for holding "before" lines, the longest line that is guaranteed to be processable is the parameter size. You can change the default parameter value by adding, for example,

  --with-pcregrep-bufsize=50K

If you add

  --enable-pcretest-libreadline

Setting this option causes the -lreadline option to be added to the pcretest build. In many operating environments with a sytem-installed libreadline this is sufficient. However, in some environments (e.g. if an unmodified distribution version of readline is in use), some extra configuration may be necessary. The INSTALL file for libreadline says this:

  "Readline uses the termcap functions, but does not link with the
  termcap or curses library itself, allowing applications which link
  with readline the to choose an appropriate library."

  LIBS="-ncurses"

By adding the

  --enable-valgrind

If your C compiler is gcc, you can build a version of PCRE that can generate a code coverage report for its test suite. To enable this, you must install lcov version 1.6 or above. Then specify

  --enable-coverage

Note that using ccache (a caching C compiler) is incompatible with code coverage reporting. If you have configured ccache to run automatically on your system, you must set the environment variable

  CCACHE_DISABLE=1

When --enable-coverage is used, the following addition targets are added to the Makefile:

  make coverage

  make coverage-reset

  make coverage-baseline

  make coverage-report

  make coverage-clean-report

  make coverage-clean-data

  make coverage-clean

pcreapi(3), pcre16, pcre32, pcre_config(3).

Philip Hazel
University Computing Service
Cambridge CB2 3QH, England.

Last updated: 12 May 2013
Copyright © 1997-2013 University of Cambridge.

Return to the PCRE index page.