1News about PCRE releases 2------------------------ 3 4Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010 5------------------------ 6 7Another bug-fix release. 8 9 10Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010 11------------------------ 12 13This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and 14infelicities in the build system have been fixed. 15 16 17Release 8.00 19-Oct-09 18---------------------- 19 20Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some 21enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been 22removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching 23process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a 24full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a 25lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have 26duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have 27different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes. 28The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate 29of change is not slowing down. 30 31 32Release 7.9 11-Apr-09 33--------------------- 34 35Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions. 36 37 38Release 7.8 05-Sep-08 39--------------------- 40 41More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property 42lookup. 43 44 45Release 7.7 07-May-08 46--------------------- 47 48This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new 49features. 50 51 52Release 7.6 28-Jan-08 53--------------------- 54 55The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a 56potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In 57addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date. 58 59 60Release 7.5 10-Jan-08 61--------------------- 62 63This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with 64libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been 65added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to 66pcregrep. 67 68 69Release 7.4 21-Sep-07 70--------------------- 71 72The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether 73\R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF. 74Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of 75relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation 76updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE 77has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file. 78 79 80Release 7.3 28-Aug-07 81--------------------- 82 83Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not: 84 851. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control 86 verbs" such as (*PRUNE). 87 882. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more 89 restrictive in the strings it accepts. 90 913. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a 92 consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that 93 has a limited repeat count. 94 954. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec() 96 no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match 97 fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern. 98 This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred. 99 1005. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of 101 a pattern have been added. 102 103 104Release 7.2 19-Jun-07 105--------------------- 106 107WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be 108recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v, 109and \V). 110 111Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is 112wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function 113independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the 114functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries 115are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the 116pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and 117the basic pcre library. 118 119Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added: 120 121 (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines. 122 123 (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions. 124 125 \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>. 126 127 \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar 128 matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string. 129 130 (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative 131 start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing 132 parentheses number 1 in both cases. 133 134 \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively. 135 136 137Release 7.1 24-Apr-07 138--------------------- 139 140There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of 141PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which 142recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks. 143 144A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a 145complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools 146support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling 147PCRE in a wide variety of environments. 148 149NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built, 150called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was 151included in a single dll. 152 153Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer 154compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character 155tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate 156the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the 157"configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a 158system that uses EBCDIC code. 159 160There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is 161not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling. 162 163 164Release 7.0 19-Dec-06 165--------------------- 166 167This release has a new major number because there have been some internal 168upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities, 169and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely 170to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance. 171Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If 172you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to 173re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are: 174 1751. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds 176 some more scripts. 177 1782. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline 179 sequence as a newline. 180 1813. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit. 182 1834. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include 184 alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for 185 recursion. 186 1875. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a 188 QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and 189 assignment. 190 191For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. 192 193 194Release 6.7 04-Jul-06 195--------------------- 196 197The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for 198multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the 199library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing). 200 201Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been 202significantly reduced for certain subject strings. 203 204 205Release 6.5 01-Feb-06 206--------------------- 207 208Important changes in this release: 209 2101. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep. 211 2122. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the 213 supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic", 214 and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to 215 the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that 216 use \p or \P must be recompiled. 217 2183. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all 219 recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for 220 example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because 221 otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work. 222 223See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug 224fixes and tidies. 225 226 227Release 6.0 07-Jun-05 228--------------------- 229 230The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several 231major new pieces of functionality. 232 233A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA 234algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases, 235though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On 236the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works 237better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the 238differences. 239 240The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new 241pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides. 242 243The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built 244automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this 245interface. 246 247The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each 248function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static 249linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have 250their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They 251are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers. 252 253The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as 254multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the 255ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility 256programs. 257 258 259Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 260--------------------- 261 262The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more 263conventional "BSD" licence. 264 265In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes 266in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes 267are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The 268new features are: 269 2701. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every 271 item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position 272 in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. 273 2742. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character 275 tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used 276 at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the 277 default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled 278 pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything 279 special unless you are using custom tables. 280 2813. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to 282 request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the 283 subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing 284 an input field as it is being typed. 285 2864. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which 287 means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only 288 the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this 289 support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the 290 size of the library dramatically. 291 2925. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. 293 2946. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a 295 different host with the opposite endianness. 296 2977. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. 298 299The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no 300longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This 301makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching 302possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a 303result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. 304 305 306Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 307--------------------- 308 309Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features: 310 3111. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive 312function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows 313things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks. 314 3152. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to 316check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the 317latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET. 318 3193. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code. 320 321 322Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 323--------------------- 324 325This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE 326checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress 327this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance. 328 329 330Releases 4.1 - 4.3 331------------------ 332 333Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a 334look at ChangeLog. 335 336 337Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 338--------------------- 339 340There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional 341functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new 342functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the 343documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. 344 3451. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. 346 3472. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java 348package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic 349grouping". 350 3513. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position 352is at the start point of the match. 353 3544. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides 355with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE 356is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to 357its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at 358appropriate points. 359 3605. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really 361easy to get totally confused. 362 3636. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to 364name a group. 365 3667. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an 367option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. 368 3698. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. 370These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate 371directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking 372between the pages has been installed. 373 374 375Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 376--------------------- 377 3781. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf 379and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS 380supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure 381command if you want only one of them. 382 3832. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is 384useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets 385relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so 386there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc. 387 3883. Upgrades to pcregrep: 389 (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep. 390 (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase. 391 (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories. 392 (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file. 393 3944. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure 395script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix 396systems, the value can be set in config.h. 397 3985. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an 399absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and 400likewise updated the man page. 401 4026. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed. 403The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit. 404 405 406Release 3.3 01-Aug-00 407--------------------- 408 409There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and 410experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented. 411Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release. 412 413 414Release 3.0 01-Feb-00 415--------------------- 416 4171. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It 418builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script. 419 4202. PCRE is built as a shared library by default. 421 4223. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:]. 423 4245. There is an experimental recursion feature. 425 426---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 427 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00 428 429Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger 430ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace. 431The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support 432some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005. 433 434 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00 435 436Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the 437pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it 438possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current 439locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new arguement 440should be passed as NULL. 441 442 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05 443 444Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made 445to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been 446added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the 447subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man 448page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all 449you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a 450value of zero. For example, change 451 452 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize) 453to 454 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize) 455 456**** 457