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@@ -0,0 +1,693 @@ +News about PCRE releases +------------------------ + +Release 8.35 04-April-2014 +-------------------------- + +There have been performance improvements for classes containing non-ASCII +characters and the "auto-possessification" feature has been extended. Other +minor improvements have been implemented and bugs fixed. There is a new callout +feature to enable applications to do detailed stack checks at compile time, to +avoid running out of stack for deeply nested parentheses. The JIT compiler has +been extended with experimental support for ARM-64, MIPS-64, and PPC-LE. + + +Release 8.34 15-December-2013 +----------------------------- + +As well as fixing the inevitable bugs, performance has been improved by +refactoring and extending the amount of "auto-possessification" that PCRE does. +Other notable changes: + +. Implemented PCRE_INFO_MATCH_EMPTY, which yields 1 if the pattern can match + an empty string. If it can, pcretest shows this in its information output. + +. A back reference to a named subpattern when there is more than one of the + same name now checks them in the order in which they appear in the pattern. + The first one that is set is used for the reference. Previously only the + first one was inspected. This change makes PCRE more compatible with Perl. + +. Unicode character properties were updated from Unicode 6.3.0. + +. The character VT has been added to the set of characters that match \s and + are generally treated as white space, following this same change in Perl + 5.18. There is now no difference between "Perl space" and "POSIX space". + +. Perl has changed its handling of \8 and \9. If there is no previously + encountered capturing group of those numbers, they are treated as the + literal characters 8 and 9 instead of a binary zero followed by the + literals. PCRE now does the same. + +. Following Perl, added \o{} to specify codepoints in octal, making it + possible to specify values greater than 0777 and also making them + unambiguous. + +. In UCP mode, \s was not matching two of the characters that Perl matches, + namely NEL (U+0085) and MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR (U+180E), though they + were matched by \h. + +. Add JIT support for the 64 bit TileGX architecture. + +. Upgraded the handling of the POSIX classes [:graph:], [:print:], and + [:punct:] when PCRE_UCP is set so as to include the same characters as Perl + does in Unicode mode. + +. Perl no longer allows group names to start with digits, so I have made this + change also in PCRE. + +. Added support for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] as used in the BSD POSIX library to + mean "start of word" and "end of word", respectively, as a transition aid. + + +Release 8.33 28-May-2013 +-------------------------- + +A number of bugs are fixed, and some performance improvements have been made. +There are also some new features, of which these are the most important: + +. The behaviour of the backtracking verbs has been rationalized and + documented in more detail. + +. JIT now supports callouts and all of the backtracking verbs. + +. Unicode validation has been updated in the light of Unicode Corrigendum #9, + which points out that "non characters" are not "characters that may not + appear in Unicode strings" but rather "characters that are reserved for + internal use and have only local meaning". + +. (*LIMIT_MATCH=d) and (*LIMIT_RECURSION=d) have been added so that the + creator of a pattern can specify lower (but not higher) limits for the + matching process. + +. The PCRE_NEVER_UTF option is available to prevent pattern-writers from using + the (*UTF) feature, as this could be a security issue. + + +Release 8.32 30-November-2012 +----------------------------- + +This release fixes a number of bugs, but also has some new features. These are +the highlights: + +. There is now support for 32-bit character strings and UTF-32. Like the + 16-bit support, this is done by compiling a separate 32-bit library. + +. \X now matches a Unicode extended grapheme cluster. + +. Case-independent matching of Unicode characters that have more than one + "other case" now makes all three (or more) characters equivalent. This + applies, for example, to Greek Sigma, which has two lowercase versions. + +. Unicode character properties are updated to Unicode 6.2.0. + +. The EBCDIC support, which had decayed, has had a spring clean. + +. A number of JIT optimizations have been added, which give faster JIT + execution speed. In addition, a new direct interface to JIT execution is + available. This bypasses some of the sanity checks of pcre_exec() to give a + noticeable speed-up. + +. A number of issues in pcregrep have been fixed, making it more compatible + with GNU grep. In particular, --exclude and --include (and variants) apply + to all files now, not just those obtained from scanning a directory + recursively. In Windows environments, the default action for directories is + now "skip" instead of "read" (which provokes an error). + +. If the --only-matching (-o) option in pcregrep is specified multiple + times, each one causes appropriate output. For example, -o1 -o2 outputs the + substrings matched by the 1st and 2nd capturing parentheses. A separating + string can be specified by --om-separator (default empty). + +. When PCRE is built via Autotools using a version of gcc that has the + "visibility" feature, it is used to hide internal library functions that are + not part of the public API. + + +Release 8.31 06-July-2012 +------------------------- + +This is mainly a bug-fixing release, with a small number of developments: + +. The JIT compiler now supports partial matching and the (*MARK) and + (*COMMIT) verbs. + +. PCRE_INFO_MAXLOOKBEHIND can be used to find the longest lookbehind in a + pattern. + +. There should be a performance improvement when using the heap instead of the + stack for recursion. + +. pcregrep can now be linked with libedit as an alternative to libreadline. + +. pcregrep now has a --file-list option where the list of files to scan is + given as a file. + +. pcregrep now recognizes binary files and there are related options. + +. The Unicode tables have been updated to 6.1.0. + +As always, the full list of changes is in the ChangeLog file. + + +Release 8.30 04-February-2012 +----------------------------- + +Release 8.30 introduces a major new feature: support for 16-bit character +strings, compiled as a separate library. There are a few changes to the +8-bit library, in addition to some bug fixes. + +. The pcre_info() function, which has been obsolete for over 10 years, has + been removed. + +. When a compiled pattern was saved to a file and later reloaded on a host + with different endianness, PCRE used automatically to swap the bytes in some + of the data fields. With the advent of the 16-bit library, where more of this + swapping is needed, it is no longer done automatically. Instead, the bad + endianness is detected and a specific error is given. The user can then call + a new function called pcre_pattern_to_host_byte_order() (or an equivalent + 16-bit function) to do the swap. + +. In UTF-8 mode, the values 0xd800 to 0xdfff are not legal Unicode + code points and are now faulted. (They are the so-called "surrogates" + that are reserved for coding high values in UTF-16.) + + +Release 8.21 12-Dec-2011 +------------------------ + +This is almost entirely a bug-fix release. The only new feature is the ability +to obtain the size of the memory used by the JIT compiler. + + +Release 8.20 21-Oct-2011 +------------------------ + +The main change in this release is the inclusion of Zoltan Herczeg's +just-in-time compiler support, which can be accessed by building PCRE with +--enable-jit. Large performance benefits can be had in many situations. 8.20 +also fixes an unfortunate bug that was introduced in 8.13 as well as tidying up +a number of infelicities and differences from Perl. + + +Release 8.13 16-Aug-2011 +------------------------ + +This is mainly a bug-fix release. There has been a lot of internal refactoring. +The Unicode tables have been updated. The only new feature in the library is +the passing of *MARK information to callouts. Some additions have been made to +pcretest to make testing easier and more comprehensive. There is a new option +for pcregrep to adjust its internal buffer size. + + +Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011 +------------------------ + +This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail +on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library. + + +Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010 +------------------------ + +A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see +ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes: + +. Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep. + +. Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options + of pcregrep. + +. Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and + \B. + +. Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a + bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD. + +. Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_ + START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time + + +Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010 +------------------------ + +There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option +PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their +opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number +of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option, +--line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to +pipes. + + +Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010 +------------------------ + +Another bug-fix release. + + +Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010 +------------------------ + +This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and +infelicities in the build system have been fixed. + + +Release 8.00 19-Oct-09 +---------------------- + +Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some +enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been +removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching +process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a +full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a +lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have +duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have +different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes. +The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate +of change is not slowing down. + + +Release 7.9 11-Apr-09 +--------------------- + +Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions. + + +Release 7.8 05-Sep-08 +--------------------- + +More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property +lookup. + + +Release 7.7 07-May-08 +--------------------- + +This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new +features. + + +Release 7.6 28-Jan-08 +--------------------- + +The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a +potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In +addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date. + + +Release 7.5 10-Jan-08 +--------------------- + +This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with +libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been +added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to +pcregrep. + + +Release 7.4 21-Sep-07 +--------------------- + +The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether +\R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF. +Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of +relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation +updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE +has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file. + + +Release 7.3 28-Aug-07 +--------------------- + +Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not: + +1. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control + verbs" such as (*PRUNE). + +2. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more + restrictive in the strings it accepts. + +3. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a + consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that + has a limited repeat count. + +4. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec() + no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match + fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern. + This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred. + +5. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of + a pattern have been added. + + +Release 7.2 19-Jun-07 +--------------------- + +WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be +recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v, +and \V). + +Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is +wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function +independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the +functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries +are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the +pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and +the basic pcre library. + +Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added: + + (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines. + + (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions. + + \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>. + + \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar + matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string. + + (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative + start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing + parentheses number 1 in both cases. + + \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively. + + +Release 7.1 24-Apr-07 +--------------------- + +There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of +PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which +recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks. + +A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a +complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools +support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling +PCRE in a wide variety of environments. + +NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built, +called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was +included in a single dll. + +Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer +compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character +tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate +the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the +"configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a +system that uses EBCDIC code. + +There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is +not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling. + + +Release 7.0 19-Dec-06 +--------------------- + +This release has a new major number because there have been some internal +upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities, +and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely +to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance. +Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If +you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to +re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are: + +1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds + some more scripts. + +2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline + sequence as a newline. + +3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit. + +4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include + alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for + recursion. + +5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a + QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and + assignment. + +For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. + + +Release 6.7 04-Jul-06 +--------------------- + +The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for +multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the +library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing). + +Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been +significantly reduced for certain subject strings. + + +Release 6.5 01-Feb-06 +--------------------- + +Important changes in this release: + +1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep. + +2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the + supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic", + and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to + the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that + use \p or \P must be recompiled. + +3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all + recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for + example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because + otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work. + +See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug +fixes and tidies. + + +Release 6.0 07-Jun-05 +--------------------- + +The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several +major new pieces of functionality. + +A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA +algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases, +though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On +the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works +better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the +differences. + +The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new +pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides. + +The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built +automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this +interface. + +The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each +function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static +linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have +their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They +are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers. + +The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as +multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the +ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility +programs. + + +Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 +--------------------- + +The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more +conventional "BSD" licence. + +In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes +in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes +are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The +new features are: + +1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every + item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position + in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. + +2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character + tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used + at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the + default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled + pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything + special unless you are using custom tables. + +3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to + request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the + subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing + an input field as it is being typed. + +4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which + means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only + the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this + support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the + size of the library dramatically. + +5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. + +6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a + different host with the opposite endianness. + +7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. + +The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no +longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This +makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching +possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a +result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. + + +Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 +--------------------- + +Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features: + +1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive +function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows +things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks. + +2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to +check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the +latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET. + +3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code. + + +Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 +--------------------- + +This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE +checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress +this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance. + + +Releases 4.1 - 4.3 +------------------ + +Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a +look at ChangeLog. + + +Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 +--------------------- + +There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional +functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new +functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the +documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. + +1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. + +2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java +package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic +grouping". + +3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position +is at the start point of the match. + +4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides +with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE +is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to +its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at +appropriate points. + +5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really +easy to get totally confused. + +6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to +name a group. + +7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an +option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. + +8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. +These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate +directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking +between the pages has been installed. + + +Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 +--------------------- + +1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf +and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS +supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure +command if you want only one of them. + +2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is +useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets +relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so +there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc. + +3. Upgrades to pcregrep: + (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep. + (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase. + (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories. + (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file. + +4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure +script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix +systems, the value can be set in config.h. + +5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an +absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and +likewise updated the man page. + +6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed. +The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit. + + +Release 3.3 01-Aug-00 +--------------------- + +There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and +experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented. +Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release. + + +Release 3.0 01-Feb-00 +--------------------- + +1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It +builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script. + +2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default. + +3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:]. + +5. There is an experimental recursion feature. + +---------------------------------------------------------------------------- + IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00 + +Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger +ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace. +The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support +some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005. + + IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00 + +Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the +pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it +possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current +locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new argument +should be passed as NULL. + + IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05 + +Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made +to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been +added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the +subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man +page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all +you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a +value of zero. For example, change + + pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize) +to + pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize) + +**** |