1<html>
2<head>
3<title>pcre_compile specification</title>
4</head>
5<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#00005A" link="#0066FF" alink="#3399FF" vlink="#2222BB">
6<h1>pcre_compile man page</h1>
7<p>
8Return to the <a href="index.html">PCRE index page</a>.
9</p>
10<p>
11This page is part of the PCRE HTML documentation. It was generated automatically
12from the original man page. If there is any nonsense in it, please consult the
13man page, in case the conversion went wrong.
14<br>
15<br><b>
16SYNOPSIS
17</b><br>
18<P>
19<b>#include &#60;pcre.h&#62;</b>
20</P>
21<P>
22<b>pcre *pcre_compile(const char *<i>pattern</i>, int <i>options</i>,</b>
23<b>const char **<i>errptr</i>, int *<i>erroffset</i>,</b>
24<b>const unsigned char *<i>tableptr</i>);</b>
25</P>
26<br><b>
27DESCRIPTION
28</b><br>
29<P>
30This function compiles a regular expression into an internal form. It is the
31same as <b>pcre_compile2()</b>, except for the absence of the <i>errorcodeptr</i>
32argument. Its arguments are:
33<pre>
34  <i>pattern</i>       A zero-terminated string containing the
35                  regular expression to be compiled
36  <i>options</i>       Zero or more option bits
37  <i>errptr</i>        Where to put an error message
38  <i>erroffset</i>     Offset in pattern where error was found
39  <i>tableptr</i>      Pointer to character tables, or NULL to
40                  use the built-in default
41</pre>
42The option bits are:
43<pre>
44  PCRE_ANCHORED           Force pattern anchoring
45  PCRE_AUTO_CALLOUT       Compile automatic callouts
46  PCRE_BSR_ANYCRLF        \R matches only CR, LF, or CRLF
47  PCRE_BSR_UNICODE        \R matches all Unicode line endings
48  PCRE_CASELESS           Do caseless matching
49  PCRE_DOLLAR_ENDONLY     $ not to match newline at end
50  PCRE_DOTALL             . matches anything including NL
51  PCRE_DUPNAMES           Allow duplicate names for subpatterns
52  PCRE_EXTENDED           Ignore whitespace and # comments
53  PCRE_EXTRA              PCRE extra features
54                            (not much use currently)
55  PCRE_FIRSTLINE          Force matching to be before newline
56  PCRE_JAVASCRIPT_COMPAT  JavaScript compatibility
57  PCRE_MULTILINE          ^ and $ match newlines within data
58  PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY        Recognize any Unicode newline sequence
59  PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF    Recognize CR, LF, and CRLF as newline
60                            sequences
61  PCRE_NEWLINE_CR         Set CR as the newline sequence
62  PCRE_NEWLINE_CRLF       Set CRLF as the newline sequence
63  PCRE_NEWLINE_LF         Set LF as the newline sequence
64  PCRE_NO_AUTO_CAPTURE    Disable numbered capturing paren-
65                            theses (named ones available)
66  PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK      Do not check the pattern for UTF-8
67                            validity (only relevant if
68                            PCRE_UTF8 is set)
69  PCRE_UNGREEDY           Invert greediness of quantifiers
70  PCRE_UTF8               Run in UTF-8 mode
71</pre>
72PCRE must be built with UTF-8 support in order to use PCRE_UTF8 and
73PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK.
74</P>
75<P>
76The yield of the function is a pointer to a private data structure that
77contains the compiled pattern, or NULL if an error was detected. Note that
78compiling regular expressions with one version of PCRE for use with a different
79version is not guaranteed to work and may cause crashes.
80</P>
81<P>
82There is a complete description of the PCRE native API in the
83<a href="pcreapi.html"><b>pcreapi</b></a>
84page and a description of the POSIX API in the
85<a href="pcreposix.html"><b>pcreposix</b></a>
86page.
87<p>
88Return to the <a href="index.html">PCRE index page</a>.
89</p>
90