1News about PCRE releases 2------------------------ 3 4Release 8.31 06-July-2012 5------------------------- 6 7This is mainly a bug-fixing release, with a small number of developments: 8 9. The JIT compiler now supports partial matching and the (*MARK) and 10 (*COMMIT) verbs. 11 12. PCRE_INFO_MAXLOOKBEHIND can be used to find the longest lookbehing in a 13 pattern. 14 15. There should be a performance improvement when using the heap instead of the 16 stack for recursion. 17 18. pcregrep can now be linked with libedit as an alternative to libreadline. 19 20. pcregrep now has a --file-list option where the list of files to scan is 21 given as a file. 22 23. pcregrep now recognizes binary files and there are related options. 24 25. The Unicode tables have been updated to 6.1.0. 26 27As always, the full list of changes is in the ChangeLog file. 28 29 30Release 8.30 04-February-2012 31----------------------------- 32 33Release 8.30 introduces a major new feature: support for 16-bit character 34strings, compiled as a separate library. There are a few changes to the 358-bit library, in addition to some bug fixes. 36 37. The pcre_info() function, which has been obsolete for over 10 years, has 38 been removed. 39 40. When a compiled pattern was saved to a file and later reloaded on a host 41 with different endianness, PCRE used automatically to swap the bytes in some 42 of the data fields. With the advent of the 16-bit library, where more of this 43 swapping is needed, it is no longer done automatically. Instead, the bad 44 endianness is detected and a specific error is given. The user can then call 45 a new function called pcre_pattern_to_host_byte_order() (or an equivalent 46 16-bit function) to do the swap. 47 48. In UTF-8 mode, the values 0xd800 to 0xdfff are not legal Unicode 49 code points and are now faulted. (They are the so-called "surrogates" 50 that are reserved for coding high values in UTF-16.) 51 52 53Release 8.21 12-Dec-2011 54------------------------ 55 56This is almost entirely a bug-fix release. The only new feature is the ability 57to obtain the size of the memory used by the JIT compiler. 58 59 60Release 8.20 21-Oct-2011 61------------------------ 62 63The main change in this release is the inclusion of Zoltan Herczeg's 64just-in-time compiler support, which can be accessed by building PCRE with 65--enable-jit. Large performance benefits can be had in many situations. 8.20 66also fixes an unfortunate bug that was introduced in 8.13 as well as tidying up 67a number of infelicities and differences from Perl. 68 69 70Release 8.13 16-Aug-2011 71------------------------ 72 73This is mainly a bug-fix release. There has been a lot of internal refactoring. 74The Unicode tables have been updated. The only new feature in the library is 75the passing of *MARK information to callouts. Some additions have been made to 76pcretest to make testing easier and more comprehensive. There is a new option 77for pcregrep to adjust its internal buffer size. 78 79 80Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011 81------------------------ 82 83This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail 84on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library. 85 86 87Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010 88------------------------ 89 90A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see 91ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes: 92 93. Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep. 94 95. Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options 96 of pcregrep. 97 98. Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and 99 \B. 100 101. Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a 102 bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD. 103 104. Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_ 105 START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time 106 107 108Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010 109------------------------ 110 111There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option 112PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their 113opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number 114of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option, 115--line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to 116pipes. 117 118 119Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010 120------------------------ 121 122Another bug-fix release. 123 124 125Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010 126------------------------ 127 128This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and 129infelicities in the build system have been fixed. 130 131 132Release 8.00 19-Oct-09 133---------------------- 134 135Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some 136enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been 137removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching 138process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a 139full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a 140lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have 141duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have 142different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes. 143The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate 144of change is not slowing down. 145 146 147Release 7.9 11-Apr-09 148--------------------- 149 150Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions. 151 152 153Release 7.8 05-Sep-08 154--------------------- 155 156More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property 157lookup. 158 159 160Release 7.7 07-May-08 161--------------------- 162 163This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new 164features. 165 166 167Release 7.6 28-Jan-08 168--------------------- 169 170The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a 171potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In 172addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date. 173 174 175Release 7.5 10-Jan-08 176--------------------- 177 178This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with 179libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been 180added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to 181pcregrep. 182 183 184Release 7.4 21-Sep-07 185--------------------- 186 187The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether 188\R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF. 189Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of 190relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation 191updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE 192has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file. 193 194 195Release 7.3 28-Aug-07 196--------------------- 197 198Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not: 199 2001. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control 201 verbs" such as (*PRUNE). 202 2032. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more 204 restrictive in the strings it accepts. 205 2063. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a 207 consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that 208 has a limited repeat count. 209 2104. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec() 211 no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match 212 fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern. 213 This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred. 214 2155. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of 216 a pattern have been added. 217 218 219Release 7.2 19-Jun-07 220--------------------- 221 222WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be 223recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v, 224and \V). 225 226Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is 227wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function 228independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the 229functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries 230are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the 231pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and 232the basic pcre library. 233 234Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added: 235 236 (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines. 237 238 (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions. 239 240 \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>. 241 242 \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar 243 matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string. 244 245 (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative 246 start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing 247 parentheses number 1 in both cases. 248 249 \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively. 250 251 252Release 7.1 24-Apr-07 253--------------------- 254 255There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of 256PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which 257recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks. 258 259A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a 260complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools 261support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling 262PCRE in a wide variety of environments. 263 264NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built, 265called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was 266included in a single dll. 267 268Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer 269compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character 270tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate 271the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the 272"configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a 273system that uses EBCDIC code. 274 275There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is 276not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling. 277 278 279Release 7.0 19-Dec-06 280--------------------- 281 282This release has a new major number because there have been some internal 283upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities, 284and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely 285to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance. 286Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If 287you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to 288re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are: 289 2901. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds 291 some more scripts. 292 2932. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline 294 sequence as a newline. 295 2963. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit. 297 2984. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include 299 alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for 300 recursion. 301 3025. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a 303 QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and 304 assignment. 305 306For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. 307 308 309Release 6.7 04-Jul-06 310--------------------- 311 312The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for 313multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the 314library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing). 315 316Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been 317significantly reduced for certain subject strings. 318 319 320Release 6.5 01-Feb-06 321--------------------- 322 323Important changes in this release: 324 3251. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep. 326 3272. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the 328 supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic", 329 and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to 330 the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that 331 use \p or \P must be recompiled. 332 3333. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all 334 recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for 335 example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because 336 otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work. 337 338See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug 339fixes and tidies. 340 341 342Release 6.0 07-Jun-05 343--------------------- 344 345The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several 346major new pieces of functionality. 347 348A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA 349algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases, 350though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On 351the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works 352better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the 353differences. 354 355The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new 356pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides. 357 358The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built 359automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this 360interface. 361 362The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each 363function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static 364linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have 365their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They 366are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers. 367 368The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as 369multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the 370ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility 371programs. 372 373 374Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 375--------------------- 376 377The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more 378conventional "BSD" licence. 379 380In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes 381in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes 382are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The 383new features are: 384 3851. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every 386 item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position 387 in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. 388 3892. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character 390 tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used 391 at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the 392 default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled 393 pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything 394 special unless you are using custom tables. 395 3963. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to 397 request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the 398 subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing 399 an input field as it is being typed. 400 4014. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which 402 means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only 403 the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this 404 support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the 405 size of the library dramatically. 406 4075. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. 408 4096. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a 410 different host with the opposite endianness. 411 4127. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. 413 414The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no 415longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This 416makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching 417possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a 418result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. 419 420 421Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 422--------------------- 423 424Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features: 425 4261. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive 427function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows 428things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks. 429 4302. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to 431check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the 432latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET. 433 4343. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code. 435 436 437Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 438--------------------- 439 440This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE 441checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress 442this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance. 443 444 445Releases 4.1 - 4.3 446------------------ 447 448Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a 449look at ChangeLog. 450 451 452Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 453--------------------- 454 455There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional 456functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new 457functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the 458documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. 459 4601. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. 461 4622. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java 463package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic 464grouping". 465 4663. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position 467is at the start point of the match. 468 4694. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides 470with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE 471is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to 472its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at 473appropriate points. 474 4755. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really 476easy to get totally confused. 477 4786. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to 479name a group. 480 4817. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an 482option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. 483 4848. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. 485These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate 486directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking 487between the pages has been installed. 488 489 490Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 491--------------------- 492 4931. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf 494and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS 495supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure 496command if you want only one of them. 497 4982. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is 499useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets 500relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so 501there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc. 502 5033. Upgrades to pcregrep: 504 (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep. 505 (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase. 506 (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories. 507 (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file. 508 5094. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure 510script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix 511systems, the value can be set in config.h. 512 5135. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an 514absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and 515likewise updated the man page. 516 5176. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed. 518The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit. 519 520 521Release 3.3 01-Aug-00 522--------------------- 523 524There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and 525experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented. 526Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release. 527 528 529Release 3.0 01-Feb-00 530--------------------- 531 5321. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It 533builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script. 534 5352. PCRE is built as a shared library by default. 536 5373. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:]. 538 5395. There is an experimental recursion feature. 540 541---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 542 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00 543 544Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger 545ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace. 546The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support 547some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005. 548 549 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00 550 551Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the 552pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it 553possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current 554locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new arguement 555should be passed as NULL. 556 557 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05 558 559Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made 560to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been 561added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the 562subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man 563page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all 564you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a 565value of zero. For example, change 566 567 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize) 568to 569 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize) 570 571**** 572