4 Note that the PCRE 8.xx series (PCRE1) is now in a bugfix-only state. All
5 development is happening in the PCRE2 10.xx series.
7 Version 8.38 23-November-2015
8 -----------------------------
10 1. If a group that contained a recursive back reference also contained a
11 forward reference subroutine call followed by a non-forward-reference
12 subroutine call, for example /.((?2)(?R)\1)()/, pcre2_compile() failed to
13 compile correct code, leading to undefined behaviour or an internally
14 detected error. This bug was discovered by the LLVM fuzzer.
16 2. Quantification of certain items (e.g. atomic back references) could cause
17 incorrect code to be compiled when recursive forward references were
18 involved. For example, in this pattern: /(?1)()((((((\1++))\x85)+)|))/.
19 This bug was discovered by the LLVM fuzzer.
21 3. A repeated conditional group whose condition was a reference by name caused
22 a buffer overflow if there was more than one group with the given name.
23 This bug was discovered by the LLVM fuzzer.
25 4. A recursive back reference by name within a group that had the same name as
26 another group caused a buffer overflow. For example:
27 /(?J)(?'d'(?'d'\g{d}))/. This bug was discovered by the LLVM fuzzer.
29 5. A forward reference by name to a group whose number is the same as the
30 current group, for example in this pattern: /(?|(\k'Pm')|(?'Pm'))/, caused
31 a buffer overflow at compile time. This bug was discovered by the LLVM
34 6. A lookbehind assertion within a set of mutually recursive subpatterns could
35 provoke a buffer overflow. This bug was discovered by the LLVM fuzzer.
37 7. Another buffer overflow bug involved duplicate named groups with a
38 reference between their definition, with a group that reset capture
39 numbers, for example: /(?J:(?|(?'R')(\k'R')|((?'R'))))/. This has been
40 fixed by always allowing for more memory, even if not needed. (A proper fix
41 is implemented in PCRE2, but it involves more refactoring.)
43 8. There was no check for integer overflow in subroutine calls such as (?123).
45 9. The table entry for \l in EBCDIC environments was incorrect, leading to its
46 being treated as a literal 'l' instead of causing an error.
48 10. There was a buffer overflow if pcre_exec() was called with an ovector of
49 size 1. This bug was found by american fuzzy lop.
51 11. If a non-capturing group containing a conditional group that could match
52 an empty string was repeated, it was not identified as matching an empty
53 string itself. For example: /^(?:(?(1)x|)+)+$()/.
55 12. In an EBCDIC environment, pcretest was mishandling the escape sequences
56 \a and \e in test subject lines.
58 13. In an EBCDIC environment, \a in a pattern was converted to the ASCII
59 instead of the EBCDIC value.
61 14. The handling of \c in an EBCDIC environment has been revised so that it is
62 now compatible with the specification in Perl's perlebcdic page.
64 15. The EBCDIC character 0x41 is a non-breaking space, equivalent to 0xa0 in
65 ASCII/Unicode. This has now been added to the list of characters that are
66 recognized as white space in EBCDIC.
68 16. When PCRE was compiled without UCP support, the use of \p and \P gave an
69 error (correctly) when used outside a class, but did not give an error
72 17. \h within a class was incorrectly compiled in EBCDIC environments.
74 18. A pattern with an unmatched closing parenthesis that contained a backward
75 assertion which itself contained a forward reference caused buffer
76 overflow. And example pattern is: /(?=di(?<=(?1))|(?=(.))))/.
78 19. JIT should return with error when the compiled pattern requires more stack
79 space than the maximum.
81 20. A possessively repeated conditional group that could match an empty string,
82 for example, /(?(R))*+/, was incorrectly compiled.
84 21. Fix infinite recursion in the JIT compiler when certain patterns such as
85 /(?:|a|){100}x/ are analysed.
87 22. Some patterns with character classes involving [: and \\ were incorrectly
88 compiled and could cause reading from uninitialized memory or an incorrect
91 23. Pathological patterns containing many nested occurrences of [: caused
92 pcre_compile() to run for a very long time.
94 24. A conditional group with only one branch has an implicit empty alternative
95 branch and must therefore be treated as potentially matching an empty
98 25. If (?R was followed by - or + incorrect behaviour happened instead of a
101 26. Arrange to give up on finding the minimum matching length for overly
104 27. Similar to (4) above: in a pattern with duplicated named groups and an
105 occurrence of (?| it is possible for an apparently non-recursive back
106 reference to become recursive if a later named group with the relevant
107 number is encountered. This could lead to a buffer overflow. Wen Guanxing
108 from Venustech ADLAB discovered this bug.
110 28. If pcregrep was given the -q option with -c or -l, or when handling a
111 binary file, it incorrectly wrote output to stdout.
113 29. The JIT compiler did not restore the control verb head in case of *THEN
114 control verbs. This issue was found by Karl Skomski with a custom LLVM
117 30. Error messages for syntax errors following \g and \k were giving inaccurate
118 offsets in the pattern.
120 31. Added a check for integer overflow in conditions (?(<digits>) and
121 (?(R<digits>). This omission was discovered by Karl Skomski with the LLVM
124 32. Handling recursive references such as (?2) when the reference is to a group
125 later in the pattern uses code that is very hacked about and error-prone.
126 It has been re-written for PCRE2. Here in PCRE1, a check has been added to
127 give an internal error if it is obvious that compiling has gone wrong.
129 33. The JIT compiler should not check repeats after a {0,1} repeat byte code.
130 This issue was found by Karl Skomski with a custom LLVM fuzzer.
132 34. The JIT compiler should restore the control chain for empty possessive
133 repeats. This issue was found by Karl Skomski with a custom LLVM fuzzer.
135 35. Match limit check added to JIT recursion. This issue was found by Karl
136 Skomski with a custom LLVM fuzzer.
138 36. Yet another case similar to 27 above has been circumvented by an
139 unconditional allocation of extra memory. This issue is fixed "properly" in
140 PCRE2 by refactoring the way references are handled. Wen Guanxing
141 from Venustech ADLAB discovered this bug.
143 37. Fix two assertion fails in JIT. These issues were found by Karl Skomski
144 with a custom LLVM fuzzer.
146 38. Fixed a corner case of range optimization in JIT.
148 39. An incorrect error "overran compiling workspace" was given if there were
149 exactly enough group forward references such that the last one extended
150 into the workspace safety margin. The next one would have expanded the
151 workspace. The test for overflow was not including the safety margin.
153 40. A match limit issue is fixed in JIT which was found by Karl Skomski
154 with a custom LLVM fuzzer.
156 41. Remove the use of /dev/null in testdata/testinput2, because it doesn't
157 work under Windows. (Why has it taken so long for anyone to notice?)
159 42. In a character class such as [\W\p{Any}] where both a negative-type escape
160 ("not a word character") and a property escape were present, the property
161 escape was being ignored.
163 43. Fix crash caused by very long (*MARK) or (*THEN) names.
165 44. A sequence such as [[:punct:]b] that is, a POSIX character class followed
166 by a single ASCII character in a class item, was incorrectly compiled in
167 UCP mode. The POSIX class got lost, but only if the single character
170 45. [:punct:] in UCP mode was matching some characters in the range 128-255
171 that should not have been matched.
173 46. If [:^ascii:] or [:^xdigit:] or [:^cntrl:] are present in a non-negated
174 class, all characters with code points greater than 255 are in the class.
175 When a Unicode property was also in the class (if PCRE_UCP is set, escapes
176 such as \w are turned into Unicode properties), wide characters were not
177 correctly handled, and could fail to match.
180 Version 8.37 28-April-2015
181 --------------------------
183 1. When an (*ACCEPT) is triggered inside capturing parentheses, it arranges
184 for those parentheses to be closed with whatever has been captured so far.
185 However, it was failing to mark any other groups between the hightest
186 capture so far and the currrent group as "unset". Thus, the ovector for
187 those groups contained whatever was previously there. An example is the
188 pattern /(x)|((*ACCEPT))/ when matched against "abcd".
190 2. If an assertion condition was quantified with a minimum of zero (an odd
191 thing to do, but it happened), SIGSEGV or other misbehaviour could occur.
193 3. If a pattern in pcretest input had the P (POSIX) modifier followed by an
194 unrecognized modifier, a crash could occur.
196 4. An attempt to do global matching in pcretest with a zero-length ovector
199 5. Fixed a memory leak during matching that could occur for a subpattern
200 subroutine call (recursive or otherwise) if the number of captured groups
201 that had to be saved was greater than ten.
203 6. Catch a bad opcode during auto-possessification after compiling a bad UTF
204 string with NO_UTF_CHECK. This is a tidyup, not a bug fix, as passing bad
205 UTF with NO_UTF_CHECK is documented as having an undefined outcome.
207 7. A UTF pattern containing a "not" match of a non-ASCII character and a
208 subroutine reference could loop at compile time. Example: /[^\xff]((?1))/.
210 8. When a pattern is compiled, it remembers the highest back reference so that
211 when matching, if the ovector is too small, extra memory can be obtained to
212 use instead. A conditional subpattern whose condition is a check on a
213 capture having happened, such as, for example in the pattern
214 /^(?:(a)|b)(?(1)A|B)/, is another kind of back reference, but it was not
215 setting the highest backreference number. This mattered only if pcre_exec()
216 was called with an ovector that was too small to hold the capture, and there
217 was no other kind of back reference (a situation which is probably quite
218 rare). The effect of the bug was that the condition was always treated as
219 FALSE when the capture could not be consulted, leading to a incorrect
220 behaviour by pcre_exec(). This bug has been fixed.
222 9. A reference to a duplicated named group (either a back reference or a test
223 for being set in a conditional) that occurred in a part of the pattern where
224 PCRE_DUPNAMES was not set caused the amount of memory needed for the pattern
225 to be incorrectly calculated, leading to overwriting.
227 10. A mutually recursive set of back references such as (\2)(\1) caused a
228 segfault at study time (while trying to find the minimum matching length).
229 The infinite loop is now broken (with the minimum length unset, that is,
232 11. If an assertion that was used as a condition was quantified with a minimum
233 of zero, matching went wrong. In particular, if the whole group had
234 unlimited repetition and could match an empty string, a segfault was
235 likely. The pattern (?(?=0)?)+ is an example that caused this. Perl allows
236 assertions to be quantified, but not if they are being used as conditions,
237 so the above pattern is faulted by Perl. PCRE has now been changed so that
238 it also rejects such patterns.
240 12. A possessive capturing group such as (a)*+ with a minimum repeat of zero
241 failed to allow the zero-repeat case if pcre2_exec() was called with an
242 ovector too small to capture the group.
244 13. Fixed two bugs in pcretest that were discovered by fuzzing and reported by
245 Red Hat Product Security:
247 (a) A crash if /K and /F were both set with the option to save the compiled
250 (b) Another crash if the option to print captured substrings in a callout
251 was combined with setting a null ovector, for example \O\C+ as a subject
254 14. A pattern such as "((?2){0,1999}())?", which has a group containing a
255 forward reference repeated a large (but limited) number of times within a
256 repeated outer group that has a zero minimum quantifier, caused incorrect
257 code to be compiled, leading to the error "internal error:
258 previously-checked referenced subpattern not found" when an incorrect
259 memory address was read. This bug was reported as "heap overflow",
260 discovered by Kai Lu of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs and given the CVE number
263 23. A pattern such as "((?+1)(\1))/" containing a forward reference subroutine
264 call within a group that also contained a recursive back reference caused
265 incorrect code to be compiled. This bug was reported as "heap overflow",
266 discovered by Kai Lu of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs, and given the CVE
267 number CVE-2015-2326.
269 24. Computing the size of the JIT read-only data in advance has been a source
270 of various issues, and new ones are still appear unfortunately. To fix
271 existing and future issues, size computation is eliminated from the code,
272 and replaced by on-demand memory allocation.
274 25. A pattern such as /(?i)[A-`]/, where characters in the other case are
275 adjacent to the end of the range, and the range contained characters with
276 more than one other case, caused incorrect behaviour when compiled in UTF
277 mode. In that example, the range a-j was left out of the class.
279 26. Fix JIT compilation of conditional blocks, which assertion
280 is converted to (*FAIL). E.g: /(?(?!))/.
282 27. The pattern /(?(?!)^)/ caused references to random memory. This bug was
283 discovered by the LLVM fuzzer.
285 28. The assertion (?!) is optimized to (*FAIL). This was not handled correctly
286 when this assertion was used as a condition, for example (?(?!)a|b). In
287 pcre2_match() it worked by luck; in pcre2_dfa_match() it gave an incorrect
288 error about an unsupported item.
290 29. For some types of pattern, for example /Z*(|d*){216}/, the auto-
291 possessification code could take exponential time to complete. A recursion
292 depth limit of 1000 has been imposed to limit the resources used by this
295 30. A pattern such as /(*UTF)[\S\V\H]/, which contains a negated special class
296 such as \S in non-UCP mode, explicit wide characters (> 255) can be ignored
297 because \S ensures they are all in the class. The code for doing this was
298 interacting badly with the code for computing the amount of space needed to
299 compile the pattern, leading to a buffer overflow. This bug was discovered
302 31. A pattern such as /((?2)+)((?1))/ which has mutual recursion nested inside
303 other kinds of group caused stack overflow at compile time. This bug was
304 discovered by the LLVM fuzzer.
306 32. A pattern such as /(?1)(?#?'){8}(a)/ which had a parenthesized comment
307 between a subroutine call and its quantifier was incorrectly compiled,
308 leading to buffer overflow or other errors. This bug was discovered by the
311 33. The illegal pattern /(?(?<E>.*!.*)?)/ was not being diagnosed as missing an
312 assertion after (?(. The code was failing to check the character after
313 (?(?< for the ! or = that would indicate a lookbehind assertion. This bug
314 was discovered by the LLVM fuzzer.
316 34. A pattern such as /X((?2)()*+){2}+/ which has a possessive quantifier with
317 a fixed maximum following a group that contains a subroutine reference was
318 incorrectly compiled and could trigger buffer overflow. This bug was
319 discovered by the LLVM fuzzer.
321 35. A mutual recursion within a lookbehind assertion such as (?<=((?2))((?1)))
322 caused a stack overflow instead of the diagnosis of a non-fixed length
323 lookbehind assertion. This bug was discovered by the LLVM fuzzer.
325 36. The use of \K in a positive lookbehind assertion in a non-anchored pattern
326 (e.g. /(?<=\Ka)/) could make pcregrep loop.
328 37. There was a similar problem to 36 in pcretest for global matches.
330 38. If a greedy quantified \X was preceded by \C in UTF mode (e.g. \C\X*),
331 and a subsequent item in the pattern caused a non-match, backtracking over
332 the repeated \X did not stop, but carried on past the start of the subject,
333 causing reference to random memory and/or a segfault. There were also some
334 other cases where backtracking after \C could crash. This set of bugs was
335 discovered by the LLVM fuzzer.
337 39. The function for finding the minimum length of a matching string could take
338 a very long time if mutual recursion was present many times in a pattern,
339 for example, /((?2){73}(?2))((?1))/. A better mutual recursion detection
340 method has been implemented. This infelicity was discovered by the LLVM
343 40. Static linking against the PCRE library using the pkg-config module was
344 failing on missing pthread symbols.
347 Version 8.36 26-September-2014
348 ------------------------------
350 1. Got rid of some compiler warnings in the C++ modules that were shown up by
351 -Wmissing-field-initializers and -Wunused-parameter.
353 2. The tests for quantifiers being too big (greater than 65535) were being
354 applied after reading the number, and stupidly assuming that integer
355 overflow would give a negative number. The tests are now applied as the
358 3. Tidy code in pcre_exec.c where two branches that used to be different are
361 4. The JIT compiler did not generate match limit checks for certain
362 bracketed expressions with quantifiers. This may lead to exponential
363 backtracking, instead of returning with PCRE_ERROR_MATCHLIMIT. This
364 issue should be resolved now.
366 5. Fixed an issue, which occures when nested alternatives are optimized
369 6. Inserted two casts and changed some ints to size_t in the light of some
370 reported 64-bit compiler warnings (Bugzilla 1477).
372 7. Fixed a bug concerned with zero-minimum possessive groups that could match
373 an empty string, which sometimes were behaving incorrectly in the
374 interpreter (though correctly in the JIT matcher). This pcretest input is
377 '\A(?:[^"]++|"(?:[^"]*+|"")*+")++'
378 NON QUOTED "QUOT""ED" AFTER "NOT MATCHED
380 the interpreter was reporting a match of 'NON QUOTED ' only, whereas the
381 JIT matcher and Perl both matched 'NON QUOTED "QUOT""ED" AFTER '. The test
382 for an empty string was breaking the inner loop and carrying on at a lower
383 level, when possessive repeated groups should always return to a higher
384 level as they have no backtrack points in them. The empty string test now
385 occurs at the outer level.
387 8. Fixed a bug that was incorrectly auto-possessifying \w+ in the pattern
388 ^\w+(?>\s*)(?<=\w) which caused it not to match "test test".
390 9. Give a compile-time error for \o{} (as Perl does) and for \x{} (which Perl
393 10. Change 8.34/15 introduced a bug that caused the amount of memory needed
394 to hold a pattern to be incorrectly computed (too small) when there were
395 named back references to duplicated names. This could cause "internal
396 error: code overflow" or "double free or corruption" or other memory
399 11. When named subpatterns had the same prefixes, back references could be
400 confused. For example, in this pattern:
402 /(?P<Name>a)?(?P<Name2>b)?(?(<Name>)c|d)*l/
404 the reference to 'Name' was incorrectly treated as a reference to a
407 12. A pattern such as /^s?c/mi8 where the optional character has more than
408 one "other case" was incorrectly compiled such that it would only try to
409 match starting at "c".
411 13. When a pattern starting with \s was studied, VT was not included in the
412 list of possible starting characters; this should have been part of the
415 14. If a character class started [\Qx]... where x is any character, the class
416 was incorrectly terminated at the ].
418 15. If a pattern that started with a caseless match for a character with more
419 than one "other case" was studied, PCRE did not set up the starting code
420 unit bit map for the list of possible characters. Now it does. This is an
421 optimization improvement, not a bug fix.
423 16. The Unicode data tables have been updated to Unicode 7.0.0.
425 17. Fixed a number of memory leaks in pcregrep.
427 18. Avoid a compiler warning (from some compilers) for a function call with
428 a cast that removes "const" from an lvalue by using an intermediate
429 variable (to which the compiler does not object).
431 19. Incorrect code was compiled if a group that contained an internal recursive
432 back reference was optional (had quantifier with a minimum of zero). This
433 example compiled incorrect code: /(((a\2)|(a*)\g<-1>))*/ and other examples
434 caused segmentation faults because of stack overflows at compile time.
436 20. A pattern such as /((?(R)a|(?1)))+/, which contains a recursion within a
437 group that is quantified with an indefinite repeat, caused a compile-time
438 loop which used up all the system stack and provoked a segmentation fault.
439 This was not the same bug as 19 above.
441 21. Add PCRECPP_EXP_DECL declaration to operator<< in pcre_stringpiece.h.
442 Patch by Mike Frysinger.
445 Version 8.35 04-April-2014
446 --------------------------
448 1. A new flag is set, when property checks are present in an XCLASS.
449 When this flag is not set, PCRE can perform certain optimizations
450 such as studying these XCLASS-es.
452 2. The auto-possessification of character sets were improved: a normal
453 and an extended character set can be compared now. Furthermore
454 the JIT compiler optimizes more character set checks.
456 3. Got rid of some compiler warnings for potentially uninitialized variables
457 that show up only when compiled with -O2.
459 4. A pattern such as (?=ab\K) that uses \K in an assertion can set the start
460 of a match later then the end of the match. The pcretest program was not
461 handling the case sensibly - it was outputting from the start to the next
462 binary zero. It now reports this situation in a message, and outputs the
463 text from the end to the start.
465 5. Fast forward search is improved in JIT. Instead of the first three
466 characters, any three characters with fixed position can be searched.
467 Search order: first, last, middle.
469 6. Improve character range checks in JIT. Characters are read by an inprecise
470 function now, which returns with an unknown value if the character code is
471 above a certain threshold (e.g: 256). The only limitation is that the value
472 must be bigger than the threshold as well. This function is useful when
473 the characters above the threshold are handled in the same way.
475 7. The macros whose names start with RAWUCHAR are placeholders for a future
476 mode in which only the bottom 21 bits of 32-bit data items are used. To
477 make this more memorable for those maintaining the code, the names have
478 been changed to start with UCHAR21, and an extensive comment has been added
481 8. Add missing (new) files sljitNativeTILEGX.c and sljitNativeTILEGX-encoder.c
482 to the export list in Makefile.am (they were accidentally omitted from the
485 9. The informational output from pcretest used the phrase "starting byte set"
486 which is inappropriate for the 16-bit and 32-bit libraries. As the output
487 for "first char" and "need char" really means "non-UTF-char", I've changed
488 "byte" to "char", and slightly reworded the output. The documentation about
489 these values has also been (I hope) clarified.
491 10. Another JIT related optimization: use table jumps for selecting the correct
492 backtracking path, when more than four alternatives are present inside a
495 11. Empty match is not possible, when the minimum length is greater than zero,
496 and there is no \K in the pattern. JIT should avoid empty match checks in
499 12. In a caseless character class with UCP support, when a character with more
500 than one alternative case was not the first character of a range, not all
501 the alternative cases were added to the class. For example, s and \x{17f}
502 are both alternative cases for S: the class [RST] was handled correctly,
505 13. The configure.ac file always checked for pthread support when JIT was
506 enabled. This is not used in Windows, so I have put this test inside a
507 check for the presence of windows.h (which was already tested for).
509 14. Improve pattern prefix search by a simplified Boyer-Moore algorithm in JIT.
510 The algorithm provides a way to skip certain starting offsets, and usually
511 faster than linear prefix searches.
513 15. Change 13 for 8.20 updated RunTest to check for the 'fr' locale as well
514 as for 'fr_FR' and 'french'. For some reason, however, it then used the
515 Windows-specific input and output files, which have 'french' screwed in.
516 So this could never have worked. One of the problems with locales is that
517 they aren't always the same. I have now updated RunTest so that it checks
518 the output of the locale test (test 3) against three different output
519 files, and it allows the test to pass if any one of them matches. With luck
520 this should make the test pass on some versions of Solaris where it was
521 failing. Because of the uncertainty, the script did not used to stop if
522 test 3 failed; it now does. If further versions of a French locale ever
523 come to light, they can now easily be added.
525 16. If --with-pcregrep-bufsize was given a non-integer value such as "50K",
526 there was a message during ./configure, but it did not stop. This now
527 provokes an error. The invalid example in README has been corrected.
528 If a value less than the minimum is given, the minimum value has always
529 been used, but now a warning is given.
531 17. If --enable-bsr-anycrlf was set, the special 16/32-bit test failed. This
532 was a bug in the test system, which is now fixed. Also, the list of various
533 configurations that are tested for each release did not have one with both
534 16/32 bits and --enable-bar-anycrlf. It now does.
536 18. pcretest was missing "-C bsr" for displaying the \R default setting.
538 19. Little endian PowerPC systems are supported now by the JIT compiler.
540 20. The fast forward newline mechanism could enter to an infinite loop on
541 certain invalid UTF-8 input. Although we don't support these cases
542 this issue can be fixed by a performance optimization.
544 21. Change 33 of 8.34 is not sufficient to ensure stack safety because it does
545 not take account if existing stack usage. There is now a new global
546 variable called pcre_stack_guard that can be set to point to an external
547 function to check stack availability. It is called at the start of
548 processing every parenthesized group.
550 22. A typo in the code meant that in ungreedy mode the max/min qualifier
551 behaved like a min-possessive qualifier, and, for example, /a{1,3}b/U did
554 23. When UTF was disabled, the JIT program reported some incorrect compile
555 errors. These messages are silenced now.
557 24. Experimental support for ARM-64 and MIPS-64 has been added to the JIT
560 25. Change all the temporary files used in RunGrepTest to be different to those
561 used by RunTest so that the tests can be run simultaneously, for example by
565 Version 8.34 15-December-2013
566 -----------------------------
568 1. Add pcre[16|32]_jit_free_unused_memory to forcibly free unused JIT
569 executable memory. Patch inspired by Carsten Klein.
571 2. ./configure --enable-coverage defined SUPPORT_GCOV in config.h, although
572 this macro is never tested and has no effect, because the work to support
573 coverage involves only compiling and linking options and special targets in
574 the Makefile. The comment in config.h implied that defining the macro would
575 enable coverage support, which is totally false. There was also support for
576 setting this macro in the CMake files (my fault, I just copied it from
577 configure). SUPPORT_GCOV has now been removed.
579 3. Make a small performance improvement in strlen16() and strlen32() in
582 4. Change 36 for 8.33 left some unreachable statements in pcre_exec.c,
583 detected by the Solaris compiler (gcc doesn't seem to be able to diagnose
584 these cases). There was also one in pcretest.c.
586 5. Cleaned up a "may be uninitialized" compiler warning in pcre_exec.c.
588 6. In UTF mode, the code for checking whether a group could match an empty
589 string (which is used for indefinitely repeated groups to allow for
590 breaking an infinite loop) was broken when the group contained a repeated
591 negated single-character class with a character that occupied more than one
592 data item and had a minimum repetition of zero (for example, [^\x{100}]* in
593 UTF-8 mode). The effect was undefined: the group might or might not be
594 deemed as matching an empty string, or the program might have crashed.
596 7. The code for checking whether a group could match an empty string was not
597 recognizing that \h, \H, \v, \V, and \R must match a character.
599 8. Implemented PCRE_INFO_MATCH_EMPTY, which yields 1 if the pattern can match
600 an empty string. If it can, pcretest shows this in its information output.
602 9. Fixed two related bugs that applied to Unicode extended grapheme clusters
603 that were repeated with a maximizing qualifier (e.g. \X* or \X{2,5}) when
604 matched by pcre_exec() without using JIT:
606 (a) If the rest of the pattern did not match after a maximal run of
607 grapheme clusters, the code for backing up to try with fewer of them
608 did not always back up over a full grapheme when characters that do not
609 have the modifier quality were involved, e.g. Hangul syllables.
611 (b) If the match point in a subject started with modifier character, and
612 there was no match, the code could incorrectly back up beyond the match
613 point, and potentially beyond the first character in the subject,
614 leading to a segfault or an incorrect match result.
616 10. A conditional group with an assertion condition could lead to PCRE
617 recording an incorrect first data item for a match if no other first data
618 item was recorded. For example, the pattern (?(?=ab)ab) recorded "a" as a
619 first data item, and therefore matched "ca" after "c" instead of at the
622 11. Change 40 for 8.33 (allowing pcregrep to find empty strings) showed up a
623 bug that caused the command "echo a | ./pcregrep -M '|a'" to loop.
625 12. The source of pcregrep now includes z/OS-specific code so that it can be
626 compiled for z/OS as part of the special z/OS distribution.
628 13. Added the -T and -TM options to pcretest.
630 14. The code in pcre_compile.c for creating the table of named capturing groups
631 has been refactored. Instead of creating the table dynamically during the
632 actual compiling pass, the information is remembered during the pre-compile
633 pass (on the stack unless there are more than 20 named groups, in which
634 case malloc() is used) and the whole table is created before the actual
635 compile happens. This has simplified the code (it is now nearly 150 lines
636 shorter) and prepared the way for better handling of references to groups
637 with duplicate names.
639 15. A back reference to a named subpattern when there is more than one of the
640 same name now checks them in the order in which they appear in the pattern.
641 The first one that is set is used for the reference. Previously only the
642 first one was inspected. This change makes PCRE more compatible with Perl.
644 16. Unicode character properties were updated from Unicode 6.3.0.
646 17. The compile-time code for auto-possessification has been refactored, based
647 on a patch by Zoltan Herczeg. It now happens after instead of during
648 compilation. The code is cleaner, and more cases are handled. The option
649 PCRE_NO_AUTO_POSSESS is added for testing purposes, and the -O and /O
650 options in pcretest are provided to set it. It can also be set by
651 (*NO_AUTO_POSSESS) at the start of a pattern.
653 18. The character VT has been added to the default ("C" locale) set of
654 characters that match \s and are generally treated as white space,
655 following this same change in Perl 5.18. There is now no difference between
656 "Perl space" and "POSIX space". Whether VT is treated as white space in
657 other locales depends on the locale.
659 19. The code for checking named groups as conditions, either for being set or
660 for being recursed, has been refactored (this is related to 14 and 15
661 above). Processing unduplicated named groups should now be as fast at
662 numerical groups, and processing duplicated groups should be faster than
665 20. Two patches to the CMake build system, by Alexander Barkov:
667 (1) Replace the "source" command by "." in CMakeLists.txt because
668 "source" is a bash-ism.
670 (2) Add missing HAVE_STDINT_H and HAVE_INTTYPES_H to config-cmake.h.in;
671 without these the CMake build does not work on Solaris.
673 21. Perl has changed its handling of \8 and \9. If there is no previously
674 encountered capturing group of those numbers, they are treated as the
675 literal characters 8 and 9 instead of a binary zero followed by the
676 literals. PCRE now does the same.
678 22. Following Perl, added \o{} to specify codepoints in octal, making it
679 possible to specify values greater than 0777 and also making them
682 23. Perl now gives an error for missing closing braces after \x{... instead of
683 treating the string as literal. PCRE now does the same.
685 24. RunTest used to grumble if an inappropriate test was selected explicitly,
686 but just skip it when running all tests. This make it awkward to run ranges
687 of tests when one of them was inappropriate. Now it just skips any
688 inappropriate tests, as it always did when running all tests.
690 25. If PCRE_AUTO_CALLOUT and PCRE_UCP were set for a pattern that contained
691 character types such as \d or \w, too many callouts were inserted, and the
692 data that they returned was rubbish.
694 26. In UCP mode, \s was not matching two of the characters that Perl matches,
695 namely NEL (U+0085) and MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR (U+180E), though they
696 were matched by \h. The code has now been refactored so that the lists of
697 the horizontal and vertical whitespace characters used for \h and \v (which
698 are defined only in one place) are now also used for \s.
700 27. Add JIT support for the 64 bit TileGX architecture.
701 Patch by Jiong Wang (Tilera Corporation).
703 28. Possessive quantifiers for classes (both explicit and automatically
704 generated) now use special opcodes instead of wrapping in ONCE brackets.
706 29. Whereas an item such as A{4}+ ignored the possessivenes of the quantifier
707 (because it's meaningless), this was not happening when PCRE_CASELESS was
708 set. Not wrong, but inefficient.
710 30. Updated perltest.pl to add /u (force Unicode mode) when /W (use Unicode
711 properties for \w, \d, etc) is present in a test regex. Otherwise if the
712 test contains no characters greater than 255, Perl doesn't realise it
713 should be using Unicode semantics.
715 31. Upgraded the handling of the POSIX classes [:graph:], [:print:], and
716 [:punct:] when PCRE_UCP is set so as to include the same characters as Perl
717 does in Unicode mode.
719 32. Added the "forbid" facility to pcretest so that putting tests into the
720 wrong test files can sometimes be quickly detected.
722 33. There is now a limit (default 250) on the depth of nesting of parentheses.
723 This limit is imposed to control the amount of system stack used at compile
724 time. It can be changed at build time by --with-parens-nest-limit=xxx or
725 the equivalent in CMake.
727 34. Character classes such as [A-\d] or [a-[:digit:]] now cause compile-time
728 errors. Perl warns for these when in warning mode, but PCRE has no facility
731 35. Change 34 for 8.13 allowed quantifiers on assertions, because Perl does.
732 However, this was not working for (?!) because it is optimized to (*FAIL),
733 for which PCRE does not allow quantifiers. The optimization is now disabled
734 when a quantifier follows (?!). I can't see any use for this, but it makes
737 36. Perl no longer allows group names to start with digits, so I have made this
738 change also in PCRE. It simplifies the code a bit.
740 37. In extended mode, Perl ignores spaces before a + that indicates a
741 possessive quantifier. PCRE allowed a space before the quantifier, but not
742 before the possessive +. It now does.
744 38. The use of \K (reset reported match start) within a repeated possessive
745 group such as (a\Kb)*+ was not working.
747 40. Document that the same character tables must be used at compile time and
748 run time, and that the facility to pass tables to pcre_exec() and
749 pcre_dfa_exec() is for use only with saved/restored patterns.
751 41. Applied Jeff Trawick's patch CMakeLists.txt, which "provides two new
752 features for Builds with MSVC:
754 1. Support pcre.rc and/or pcreposix.rc (as is already done for MinGW
755 builds). The .rc files can be used to set FileDescription and many other
758 2. Add an option (-DINSTALL_MSVC_PDB) to enable installation of .pdb files.
759 This allows higher-level build scripts which want .pdb files to avoid
760 hard-coding the exact files needed."
762 42. Added support for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] as used in the BSD POSIX library to
763 mean "start of word" and "end of word", respectively, as a transition aid.
765 43. A minimizing repeat of a class containing codepoints greater than 255 in
766 non-UTF 16-bit or 32-bit modes caused an internal error when PCRE was
767 compiled to use the heap for recursion.
769 44. Got rid of some compiler warnings for unused variables when UTF but not UCP
773 Version 8.33 28-May-2013
774 ------------------------
776 1. Added 'U' to some constants that are compared to unsigned integers, to
777 avoid compiler signed/unsigned warnings. Added (int) casts to unsigned
778 variables that are added to signed variables, to ensure the result is
779 signed and can be negated.
781 2. Applied patch by Daniel Richard G for quashing MSVC warnings to the
784 3. Revise the creation of config.h.generic so that all boolean macros are
785 #undefined, whereas non-boolean macros are #ifndef/#endif-ed. This makes
786 overriding via -D on the command line possible.
788 4. Changing the definition of the variable "op" in pcre_exec.c from pcre_uchar
789 to unsigned int is reported to make a quite noticeable speed difference in
790 a specific Windows environment. Testing on Linux did also appear to show
791 some benefit (and it is clearly not harmful). Also fixed the definition of
792 Xop which should be unsigned.
794 5. Related to (4), changing the definition of the intermediate variable cc
795 in repeated character loops from pcre_uchar to pcre_uint32 also gave speed
798 6. Fix forward search in JIT when link size is 3 or greater. Also removed some
801 7. Adjust autogen.sh and configure.ac to lose warnings given by automake 1.12
804 8. Fix two buffer over read issues in 16 and 32 bit modes. Affects JIT only.
806 9. Optimizing fast_forward_start_bits in JIT.
808 10. Adding support for callouts in JIT, and fixing some issues revealed
809 during this work. Namely:
811 (a) Unoptimized capturing brackets incorrectly reset on backtrack.
813 (b) Minimum length was not checked before the matching is started.
815 11. The value of capture_last that is passed to callouts was incorrect in some
816 cases when there was a capture on one path that was subsequently abandoned
817 after a backtrack. Also, the capture_last value is now reset after a
818 recursion, since all captures are also reset in this case.
820 12. The interpreter no longer returns the "too many substrings" error in the
821 case when an overflowing capture is in a branch that is subsequently
822 abandoned after a backtrack.
824 13. In the pathological case when an offset vector of size 2 is used, pcretest
825 now prints out the matched string after a yield of 0 or 1.
827 14. Inlining subpatterns in recursions, when certain conditions are fulfilled.
828 Only supported by the JIT compiler at the moment.
830 15. JIT compiler now supports 32 bit Macs thanks to Lawrence Velazquez.
832 16. Partial matches now set offsets[2] to the "bumpalong" value, that is, the
833 offset of the starting point of the matching process, provided the offsets
834 vector is large enough.
836 17. The \A escape now records a lookbehind value of 1, though its execution
837 does not actually inspect the previous character. This is to ensure that,
838 in partial multi-segment matching, at least one character from the old
839 segment is retained when a new segment is processed. Otherwise, if there
840 are no lookbehinds in the pattern, \A might match incorrectly at the start
843 18. Added some #ifdef __VMS code into pcretest.c to help VMS implementations.
845 19. Redefined some pcre_uchar variables in pcre_exec.c as pcre_uint32; this
846 gives some modest performance improvement in 8-bit mode.
848 20. Added the PCRE-specific property \p{Xuc} for matching characters that can
849 be expressed in certain programming languages using Universal Character
852 21. Unicode validation has been updated in the light of Unicode Corrigendum #9,
853 which points out that "non characters" are not "characters that may not
854 appear in Unicode strings" but rather "characters that are reserved for
855 internal use and have only local meaning".
857 22. When a pattern was compiled with automatic callouts (PCRE_AUTO_CALLOUT) and
858 there was a conditional group that depended on an assertion, if the
859 assertion was false, the callout that immediately followed the alternation
860 in the condition was skipped when pcre_exec() was used for matching.
862 23. Allow an explicit callout to be inserted before an assertion that is the
863 condition for a conditional group, for compatibility with automatic
864 callouts, which always insert a callout at this point.
866 24. In 8.31, (*COMMIT) was confined to within a recursive subpattern. Perl also
867 confines (*SKIP) and (*PRUNE) in the same way, and this has now been done.
869 25. (*PRUNE) is now supported by the JIT compiler.
871 26. Fix infinite loop when /(?<=(*SKIP)ac)a/ is matched against aa.
873 27. Fix the case where there are two or more SKIPs with arguments that may be
876 28. (*SKIP) is now supported by the JIT compiler.
878 29. (*THEN) is now supported by the JIT compiler.
880 30. Update RunTest with additional test selector options.
882 31. The way PCRE handles backtracking verbs has been changed in two ways.
884 (1) Previously, in something like (*COMMIT)(*SKIP), COMMIT would override
885 SKIP. Now, PCRE acts on whichever backtracking verb is reached first by
886 backtracking. In some cases this makes it more Perl-compatible, but Perl's
887 rather obscure rules do not always do the same thing.
889 (2) Previously, backtracking verbs were confined within assertions. This is
890 no longer the case for positive assertions, except for (*ACCEPT). Again,
891 this sometimes improves Perl compatibility, and sometimes does not.
893 32. A number of tests that were in test 2 because Perl did things differently
894 have been moved to test 1, because either Perl or PCRE has changed, and
895 these tests are now compatible.
897 32. Backtracking control verbs are now handled in the same way in JIT and
900 33. An opening parenthesis in a MARK/PRUNE/SKIP/THEN name in a pattern that
901 contained a forward subroutine reference caused a compile error.
903 34. Auto-detect and optimize limited repetitions in JIT.
905 35. Implement PCRE_NEVER_UTF to lock out the use of UTF, in particular,
908 36. In the interpreter, maximizing pattern repetitions for characters and
909 character types now use tail recursion, which reduces stack usage.
911 37. The value of the max lookbehind was not correctly preserved if a compiled
912 and saved regex was reloaded on a host of different endianness.
914 38. Implemented (*LIMIT_MATCH) and (*LIMIT_RECURSION). As part of the extension
915 of the compiled pattern block, expand the flags field from 16 to 32 bits
916 because it was almost full.
918 39. Try madvise first before posix_madvise.
920 40. Change 7 for PCRE 7.9 made it impossible for pcregrep to find empty lines
921 with a pattern such as ^$. It has taken 4 years for anybody to notice! The
922 original change locked out all matches of empty strings. This has been
923 changed so that one match of an empty string per line is recognized.
924 Subsequent searches on the same line (for colouring or for --only-matching,
925 for example) do not recognize empty strings.
927 41. Applied a user patch to fix a number of spelling mistakes in comments.
929 42. Data lines longer than 65536 caused pcretest to crash.
931 43. Clarified the data type for length and startoffset arguments for pcre_exec
932 and pcre_dfa_exec in the function-specific man pages, where they were
933 explicitly stated to be in bytes, never having been updated. I also added
934 some clarification to the pcreapi man page.
936 44. A call to pcre_dfa_exec() with an output vector size less than 2 caused
937 a segmentation fault.
940 Version 8.32 30-November-2012
941 -----------------------------
943 1. Improved JIT compiler optimizations for first character search and single
946 2. Supporting IBM XL C compilers for PPC architectures in the JIT compiler.
947 Patch by Daniel Richard G.
949 3. Single character iterator optimizations in the JIT compiler.
951 4. Improved JIT compiler optimizations for character ranges.
953 5. Rename the "leave" variable names to "quit" to improve WinCE compatibility.
954 Reported by Giuseppe D'Angelo.
956 6. The PCRE_STARTLINE bit, indicating that a match can occur only at the start
957 of a line, was being set incorrectly in cases where .* appeared inside
958 atomic brackets at the start of a pattern, or where there was a subsequent
961 7. Improved instruction cache flush for POWER/PowerPC.
962 Patch by Daniel Richard G.
964 8. Fixed a number of issues in pcregrep, making it more compatible with GNU
967 (a) There is now no limit to the number of patterns to be matched.
969 (b) An error is given if a pattern is too long.
971 (c) Multiple uses of --exclude, --exclude-dir, --include, and --include-dir
974 (d) --exclude-from and --include-from (multiple use) have been added.
976 (e) Exclusions and inclusions now apply to all files and directories, not
977 just to those obtained from scanning a directory recursively.
979 (f) Multiple uses of -f and --file-list are now supported.
981 (g) In a Windows environment, the default for -d has been changed from
982 "read" (the GNU grep default) to "skip", because otherwise the presence
983 of a directory in the file list provokes an error.
985 (h) The documentation has been revised and clarified in places.
987 9. Improve the matching speed of capturing brackets.
989 10. Changed the meaning of \X so that it now matches a Unicode extended
992 11. Patch by Daniel Richard G to the autoconf files to add a macro for sorting
993 out POSIX threads when JIT support is configured.
995 12. Added support for PCRE_STUDY_EXTRA_NEEDED.
997 13. In the POSIX wrapper regcomp() function, setting re_nsub field in the preg
998 structure could go wrong in environments where size_t is not the same size
1001 14. Applied user-supplied patch to pcrecpp.cc to allow PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK to be
1004 15. The EBCDIC support had decayed; later updates to the code had included
1005 explicit references to (e.g.) \x0a instead of CHAR_LF. There has been a
1006 general tidy up of EBCDIC-related issues, and the documentation was also
1007 not quite right. There is now a test that can be run on ASCII systems to
1008 check some of the EBCDIC-related things (but is it not a full test).
1010 16. The new PCRE_STUDY_EXTRA_NEEDED option is now used by pcregrep, resulting
1011 in a small tidy to the code.
1013 17. Fix JIT tests when UTF is disabled and both 8 and 16 bit mode are enabled.
1015 18. If the --only-matching (-o) option in pcregrep is specified multiple
1016 times, each one causes appropriate output. For example, -o1 -o2 outputs the
1017 substrings matched by the 1st and 2nd capturing parentheses. A separating
1018 string can be specified by --om-separator (default empty).
1020 19. Improving the first n character searches.
1022 20. Turn case lists for horizontal and vertical white space into macros so that
1023 they are defined only once.
1025 21. This set of changes together give more compatible Unicode case-folding
1026 behaviour for characters that have more than one other case when UCP
1027 support is available.
1029 (a) The Unicode property table now has offsets into a new table of sets of
1030 three or more characters that are case-equivalent. The MultiStage2.py
1031 script that generates these tables (the pcre_ucd.c file) now scans
1032 CaseFolding.txt instead of UnicodeData.txt for character case
1035 (b) The code for adding characters or ranges of characters to a character
1036 class has been abstracted into a generalized function that also handles
1037 case-independence. In UTF-mode with UCP support, this uses the new data
1038 to handle characters with more than one other case.
1040 (c) A bug that is fixed as a result of (b) is that codepoints less than 256
1041 whose other case is greater than 256 are now correctly matched
1042 caselessly. Previously, the high codepoint matched the low one, but not
1045 (d) The processing of \h, \H, \v, and \ in character classes now makes use
1046 of the new class addition function, using character lists defined as
1047 macros alongside the case definitions of 20 above.
1049 (e) Caseless back references now work with characters that have more than
1052 (f) General caseless matching of characters with more than one other case
1055 22. Unicode character properties were updated from Unicode 6.2.0
1057 23. Improved CMake support under Windows. Patch by Daniel Richard G.
1059 24. Add support for 32-bit character strings, and UTF-32
1061 25. Major JIT compiler update (code refactoring and bugfixing).
1062 Experimental Sparc 32 support is added.
1064 26. Applied a modified version of Daniel Richard G's patch to create
1065 pcre.h.generic and config.h.generic by "make" instead of in the
1066 PrepareRelease script.
1068 27. Added a definition for CHAR_NULL (helpful for the z/OS port), and use it in
1069 pcre_compile.c when checking for a zero character.
1071 28. Introducing a native interface for JIT. Through this interface, the compiled
1072 machine code can be directly executed. The purpose of this interface is to
1073 provide fast pattern matching, so several sanity checks are not performed.
1074 However, feature tests are still performed. The new interface provides
1075 1.4x speedup compared to the old one.
1077 29. If pcre_exec() or pcre_dfa_exec() was called with a negative value for
1078 the subject string length, the error given was PCRE_ERROR_BADOFFSET, which
1079 was confusing. There is now a new error PCRE_ERROR_BADLENGTH for this case.
1081 30. In 8-bit UTF-8 mode, pcretest failed to give an error for data codepoints
1082 greater than 0x7fffffff (which cannot be represented in UTF-8, even under
1083 the "old" RFC 2279). Instead, it ended up passing a negative length to
1086 31. Add support for GCC's visibility feature to hide internal functions.
1088 32. Running "pcretest -C pcre8" or "pcretest -C pcre16" gave a spurious error
1089 "unknown -C option" after outputting 0 or 1.
1091 33. There is now support for generating a code coverage report for the test
1092 suite in environments where gcc is the compiler and lcov is installed. This
1093 is mainly for the benefit of the developers.
1095 34. If PCRE is built with --enable-valgrind, certain memory regions are marked
1096 unaddressable using valgrind annotations, allowing valgrind to detect
1097 invalid memory accesses. This is mainly for the benefit of the developers.
1099 25. (*UTF) can now be used to start a pattern in any of the three libraries.
1101 26. Give configure error if --enable-cpp but no C++ compiler found.
1104 Version 8.31 06-July-2012
1105 -------------------------
1107 1. Fixing a wrong JIT test case and some compiler warnings.
1109 2. Removed a bashism from the RunTest script.
1111 3. Add a cast to pcre_exec.c to fix the warning "unary minus operator applied
1112 to unsigned type, result still unsigned" that was given by an MS compiler
1113 on encountering the code "-sizeof(xxx)".
1115 4. Partial matching support is added to the JIT compiler.
1117 5. Fixed several bugs concerned with partial matching of items that consist
1118 of more than one character:
1120 (a) /^(..)\1/ did not partially match "aba" because checking references was
1121 done on an "all or nothing" basis. This also applied to repeated
1124 (b) \R did not give a hard partial match if \r was found at the end of the
1127 (c) \X did not give a hard partial match after matching one or more
1128 characters at the end of the subject.
1130 (d) When newline was set to CRLF, a pattern such as /a$/ did not recognize
1131 a partial match for the string "\r".
1133 (e) When newline was set to CRLF, the metacharacter "." did not recognize
1134 a partial match for a CR character at the end of the subject string.
1136 6. If JIT is requested using /S++ or -s++ (instead of just /S+ or -s+) when
1137 running pcretest, the text "(JIT)" added to the output whenever JIT is
1138 actually used to run the match.
1140 7. Individual JIT compile options can be set in pcretest by following -s+[+]
1141 or /S+[+] with a digit between 1 and 7.
1143 8. OP_NOT now supports any UTF character not just single-byte ones.
1145 9. (*MARK) control verb is now supported by the JIT compiler.
1147 10. The command "./RunTest list" lists the available tests without actually
1148 running any of them. (Because I keep forgetting what they all are.)
1150 11. Add PCRE_INFO_MAXLOOKBEHIND.
1152 12. Applied a (slightly modified) user-supplied patch that improves performance
1153 when the heap is used for recursion (compiled with --disable-stack-for-
1154 recursion). Instead of malloc and free for each heap frame each time a
1155 logical recursion happens, frames are retained on a chain and re-used where
1156 possible. This sometimes gives as much as 30% improvement.
1158 13. As documented, (*COMMIT) is now confined to within a recursive subpattern
1161 14. As documented, (*COMMIT) is now confined to within a positive assertion.
1163 15. It is now possible to link pcretest with libedit as an alternative to
1166 16. (*COMMIT) control verb is now supported by the JIT compiler.
1168 17. The Unicode data tables have been updated to Unicode 6.1.0.
1170 18. Added --file-list option to pcregrep.
1172 19. Added binary file support to pcregrep, including the -a, --binary-files,
1173 -I, and --text options.
1175 20. The madvise function is renamed for posix_madvise for QNX compatibility
1176 reasons. Fixed by Giuseppe D'Angelo.
1178 21. Fixed a bug for backward assertions with REVERSE 0 in the JIT compiler.
1180 22. Changed the option for creating symbolic links for 16-bit man pages from
1181 -s to -sf so that re-installing does not cause issues.
1183 23. Support PCRE_NO_START_OPTIMIZE in JIT as (*MARK) support requires it.
1185 24. Fixed a very old bug in pcretest that caused errors with restarted DFA
1186 matches in certain environments (the workspace was not being correctly
1187 retained). Also added to pcre_dfa_exec() a simple plausibility check on
1188 some of the workspace data at the beginning of a restart.
1190 25. \s*\R was auto-possessifying the \s* when it should not, whereas \S*\R
1191 was not doing so when it should - probably a typo introduced by SVN 528
1194 26. When PCRE_UCP was not set, \w+\x{c4} was incorrectly auto-possessifying the
1195 \w+ when the character tables indicated that \x{c4} was a word character.
1196 There were several related cases, all because the tests for doing a table
1197 lookup were testing for characters less than 127 instead of 255.
1199 27. If a pattern contains capturing parentheses that are not used in a match,
1200 their slots in the ovector are set to -1. For those that are higher than
1201 any matched groups, this happens at the end of processing. In the case when
1202 there were back references that the ovector was too small to contain
1203 (causing temporary malloc'd memory to be used during matching), and the
1204 highest capturing number was not used, memory off the end of the ovector
1205 was incorrectly being set to -1. (It was using the size of the temporary
1206 memory instead of the true size.)
1208 28. To catch bugs like 27 using valgrind, when pcretest is asked to specify an
1209 ovector size, it uses memory at the end of the block that it has got.
1211 29. Check for an overlong MARK name and give an error at compile time. The
1212 limit is 255 for the 8-bit library and 65535 for the 16-bit library.
1214 30. JIT compiler update.
1216 31. JIT is now supported on jailbroken iOS devices. Thanks for Ruiger
1219 32. Put spaces around SLJIT_PRINT_D in the JIT compiler. Required by CXX11.
1221 33. Variable renamings in the PCRE-JIT compiler. No functionality change.
1223 34. Fixed typos in pcregrep: in two places there was SUPPORT_LIBZ2 instead of
1224 SUPPORT_LIBBZ2. This caused a build problem when bzip2 but not gzip (zlib)
1227 35. Improve JIT code generation for greedy plus quantifier.
1229 36. When /((?:a?)*)*c/ or /((?>a?)*)*c/ was matched against "aac", it set group
1230 1 to "aa" instead of to an empty string. The bug affected repeated groups
1231 that could potentially match an empty string.
1233 37. Optimizing single character iterators in JIT.
1235 38. Wide characters specified with \uxxxx in JavaScript mode are now subject to
1236 the same checks as \x{...} characters in non-JavaScript mode. Specifically,
1237 codepoints that are too big for the mode are faulted, and in a UTF mode,
1238 disallowed codepoints are also faulted.
1240 39. If PCRE was compiled with UTF support, in three places in the DFA
1241 matcher there was code that should only have been obeyed in UTF mode, but
1242 was being obeyed unconditionally. In 8-bit mode this could cause incorrect
1243 processing when bytes with values greater than 127 were present. In 16-bit
1244 mode the bug would be provoked by values in the range 0xfc00 to 0xdc00. In
1245 both cases the values are those that cannot be the first data item in a UTF
1246 character. The three items that might have provoked this were recursions,
1247 possessively repeated groups, and atomic groups.
1249 40. Ensure that libpcre is explicitly listed in the link commands for pcretest
1250 and pcregrep, because some OS require shared objects to be explicitly
1251 passed to ld, causing the link step to fail if they are not.
1253 41. There were two incorrect #ifdefs in pcre_study.c, meaning that, in 16-bit
1254 mode, patterns that started with \h* or \R* might be incorrectly matched.
1257 Version 8.30 04-February-2012
1258 -----------------------------
1260 1. Renamed "isnumber" as "is_a_number" because in some Mac environments this
1261 name is defined in ctype.h.
1263 2. Fixed a bug in fixed-length calculation for lookbehinds that would show up
1264 only in quite long subpatterns.
1266 3. Removed the function pcre_info(), which has been obsolete and deprecated
1267 since it was replaced by pcre_fullinfo() in February 2000.
1269 4. For a non-anchored pattern, if (*SKIP) was given with a name that did not
1270 match a (*MARK), and the match failed at the start of the subject, a
1271 reference to memory before the start of the subject could occur. This bug
1272 was introduced by fix 17 of release 8.21.
1274 5. A reference to an unset group with zero minimum repetition was giving
1275 totally wrong answers (in non-JavaScript-compatibility mode). For example,
1276 /(another)?(\1?)test/ matched against "hello world test". This bug was
1277 introduced in release 8.13.
1279 6. Add support for 16-bit character strings (a large amount of work involving
1280 many changes and refactorings).
1282 7. RunGrepTest failed on msys because \r\n was replaced by whitespace when the
1283 command "pattern=`printf 'xxx\r\njkl'`" was run. The pattern is now taken
1286 8. Ovector size of 2 is also supported by JIT based pcre_exec (the ovector size
1287 rounding is not applied in this particular case).
1289 9. The invalid Unicode surrogate codepoints U+D800 to U+DFFF are now rejected
1290 if they appear, or are escaped, in patterns.
1292 10. Get rid of a number of -Wunused-but-set-variable warnings.
1294 11. The pattern /(?=(*:x))(q|)/ matches an empty string, and returns the mark
1295 "x". The similar pattern /(?=(*:x))((*:y)q|)/ did not return a mark at all.
1296 Oddly, Perl behaves the same way. PCRE has been fixed so that this pattern
1297 also returns the mark "x". This bug applied to capturing parentheses,
1298 non-capturing parentheses, and atomic parentheses. It also applied to some
1301 12. Stephen Kelly's patch to CMakeLists.txt allows it to parse the version
1302 information out of configure.ac instead of relying on pcre.h.generic, which
1303 is not stored in the repository.
1305 13. Applied Dmitry V. Levin's patch for a more portable method for linking with
1308 14. ZH added PCRE_CONFIG_JITTARGET; added its output to pcretest -C.
1310 15. Applied Graycode's patch to put the top-level frame on the stack rather
1311 than the heap when not using the stack for recursion. This gives a
1312 performance improvement in many cases when recursion is not deep.
1314 16. Experimental code added to "pcretest -C" to output the stack frame size.
1317 Version 8.21 12-Dec-2011
1318 ------------------------
1320 1. Updating the JIT compiler.
1322 2. JIT compiler now supports OP_NCREF, OP_RREF and OP_NRREF. New test cases
1325 3. Fix cache-flush issue on PowerPC (It is still an experimental JIT port).
1326 PCRE_EXTRA_TABLES is not suported by JIT, and should be checked before
1327 calling _pcre_jit_exec. Some extra comments are added.
1329 4. (*MARK) settings inside atomic groups that do not contain any capturing
1330 parentheses, for example, (?>a(*:m)), were not being passed out. This bug
1331 was introduced by change 18 for 8.20.
1333 5. Supporting of \x, \U and \u in JavaScript compatibility mode based on the
1336 6. Lookbehinds such as (?<=a{2}b) that contained a fixed repetition were
1337 erroneously being rejected as "not fixed length" if PCRE_CASELESS was set.
1338 This bug was probably introduced by change 9 of 8.13.
1340 7. While fixing 6 above, I noticed that a number of other items were being
1341 incorrectly rejected as "not fixed length". This arose partly because newer
1342 opcodes had not been added to the fixed-length checking code. I have (a)
1343 corrected the bug and added tests for these items, and (b) arranged for an
1344 error to occur if an unknown opcode is encountered while checking for fixed
1345 length instead of just assuming "not fixed length". The items that were
1346 rejected were: (*ACCEPT), (*COMMIT), (*FAIL), (*MARK), (*PRUNE), (*SKIP),
1347 (*THEN), \h, \H, \v, \V, and single character negative classes with fixed
1348 repetitions, e.g. [^a]{3}, with and without PCRE_CASELESS.
1350 8. A possessively repeated conditional subpattern such as (?(?=c)c|d)++ was
1351 being incorrectly compiled and would have given unpredicatble results.
1353 9. A possessively repeated subpattern with minimum repeat count greater than
1354 one behaved incorrectly. For example, (A){2,}+ behaved as if it was
1355 (A)(A)++ which meant that, after a subsequent mismatch, backtracking into
1356 the first (A) could occur when it should not.
1358 10. Add a cast and remove a redundant test from the code.
1360 11. JIT should use pcre_malloc/pcre_free for allocation.
1362 12. Updated pcre-config so that it no longer shows -L/usr/lib, which seems
1363 best practice nowadays, and helps with cross-compiling. (If the exec_prefix
1364 is anything other than /usr, -L is still shown).
1366 13. In non-UTF-8 mode, \C is now supported in lookbehinds and DFA matching.
1368 14. Perl does not support \N without a following name in a [] class; PCRE now
1369 also gives an error.
1371 15. If a forward reference was repeated with an upper limit of around 2000,
1372 it caused the error "internal error: overran compiling workspace". The
1373 maximum number of forward references (including repeats) was limited by the
1374 internal workspace, and dependent on the LINK_SIZE. The code has been
1375 rewritten so that the workspace expands (via pcre_malloc) if necessary, and
1376 the default depends on LINK_SIZE. There is a new upper limit (for safety)
1377 of around 200,000 forward references. While doing this, I also speeded up
1378 the filling in of repeated forward references.
1380 16. A repeated forward reference in a pattern such as (a)(?2){2}(.) was
1381 incorrectly expecting the subject to contain another "a" after the start.
1383 17. When (*SKIP:name) is activated without a corresponding (*MARK:name) earlier
1384 in the match, the SKIP should be ignored. This was not happening; instead
1385 the SKIP was being treated as NOMATCH. For patterns such as
1386 /A(*MARK:A)A+(*SKIP:B)Z|AAC/ this meant that the AAC branch was never
1389 18. The behaviour of (*MARK), (*PRUNE), and (*THEN) has been reworked and is
1390 now much more compatible with Perl, in particular in cases where the result
1391 is a non-match for a non-anchored pattern. For example, if
1392 /b(*:m)f|a(*:n)w/ is matched against "abc", the non-match returns the name
1393 "m", where previously it did not return a name. A side effect of this
1394 change is that for partial matches, the last encountered mark name is
1395 returned, as for non matches. A number of tests that were previously not
1396 Perl-compatible have been moved into the Perl-compatible test files. The
1397 refactoring has had the pleasing side effect of removing one argument from
1398 the match() function, thus reducing its stack requirements.
1400 19. If the /S+ option was used in pcretest to study a pattern using JIT,
1401 subsequent uses of /S (without +) incorrectly behaved like /S+.
1403 21. Retrieve executable code size support for the JIT compiler and fixing
1406 22. A caseless match of a UTF-8 character whose other case uses fewer bytes did
1407 not work when the shorter character appeared right at the end of the
1410 23. Added some (int) casts to non-JIT modules to reduce warnings on 64-bit
1413 24. Added PCRE_INFO_JITSIZE to pass on the value from (21) above, and also
1414 output it when the /M option is used in pcretest.
1416 25. The CheckMan script was not being included in the distribution. Also, added
1417 an explicit "perl" to run Perl scripts from the PrepareRelease script
1418 because this is reportedly needed in Windows.
1420 26. If study data was being save in a file and studying had not found a set of
1421 "starts with" bytes for the pattern, the data written to the file (though
1422 never used) was taken from uninitialized memory and so caused valgrind to
1425 27. Updated RunTest.bat as provided by Sheri Pierce.
1427 28. Fixed a possible uninitialized memory bug in pcre_jit_compile.c.
1429 29. Computation of memory usage for the table of capturing group names was
1430 giving an unnecessarily large value.
1433 Version 8.20 21-Oct-2011
1434 ------------------------
1436 1. Change 37 of 8.13 broke patterns like [:a]...[b:] because it thought it had
1437 a POSIX class. After further experiments with Perl, which convinced me that
1438 Perl has bugs and confusions, a closing square bracket is no longer allowed
1439 in a POSIX name. This bug also affected patterns with classes that started
1442 2. If a pattern such as /(a)b|ac/ is matched against "ac", there is no
1443 captured substring, but while checking the failing first alternative,
1444 substring 1 is temporarily captured. If the output vector supplied to
1445 pcre_exec() was not big enough for this capture, the yield of the function
1446 was still zero ("insufficient space for captured substrings"). This cannot
1447 be totally fixed without adding another stack variable, which seems a lot
1448 of expense for a edge case. However, I have improved the situation in cases
1449 such as /(a)(b)x|abc/ matched against "abc", where the return code
1450 indicates that fewer than the maximum number of slots in the ovector have
1453 3. Related to (2) above: when there are more back references in a pattern than
1454 slots in the output vector, pcre_exec() uses temporary memory during
1455 matching, and copies in the captures as far as possible afterwards. It was
1456 using the entire output vector, but this conflicts with the specification
1457 that only 2/3 is used for passing back captured substrings. Now it uses
1458 only the first 2/3, for compatibility. This is, of course, another edge
1461 4. Zoltan Herczeg's just-in-time compiler support has been integrated into the
1462 main code base, and can be used by building with --enable-jit. When this is
1463 done, pcregrep automatically uses it unless --disable-pcregrep-jit or the
1464 runtime --no-jit option is given.
1466 5. When the number of matches in a pcre_dfa_exec() run exactly filled the
1467 ovector, the return from the function was zero, implying that there were
1468 other matches that did not fit. The correct "exactly full" value is now
1471 6. If a subpattern that was called recursively or as a subroutine contained
1472 (*PRUNE) or any other control that caused it to give a non-standard return,
1473 invalid errors such as "Error -26 (nested recursion at the same subject
1474 position)" or even infinite loops could occur.
1476 7. If a pattern such as /a(*SKIP)c|b(*ACCEPT)|/ was studied, it stopped
1477 computing the minimum length on reaching *ACCEPT, and so ended up with the
1478 wrong value of 1 rather than 0. Further investigation indicates that
1479 computing a minimum subject length in the presence of *ACCEPT is difficult
1480 (think back references, subroutine calls), and so I have changed the code
1481 so that no minimum is registered for a pattern that contains *ACCEPT.
1483 8. If (*THEN) was present in the first (true) branch of a conditional group,
1484 it was not handled as intended. [But see 16 below.]
1486 9. Replaced RunTest.bat and CMakeLists.txt with improved versions provided by
1489 10. A pathological pattern such as /(*ACCEPT)a/ was miscompiled, thinking that
1490 the first byte in a match must be "a".
1492 11. Change 17 for 8.13 increased the recursion depth for patterns like
1493 /a(?:.)*?a/ drastically. I've improved things by remembering whether a
1494 pattern contains any instances of (*THEN). If it does not, the old
1495 optimizations are restored. It would be nice to do this on a per-group
1496 basis, but at the moment that is not feasible.
1498 12. In some environments, the output of pcretest -C is CRLF terminated. This
1499 broke RunTest's code that checks for the link size. A single white space
1500 character after the value is now allowed for.
1502 13. RunTest now checks for the "fr" locale as well as for "fr_FR" and "french".
1503 For "fr", it uses the Windows-specific input and output files.
1505 14. If (*THEN) appeared in a group that was called recursively or as a
1506 subroutine, it did not work as intended. [But see next item.]
1508 15. Consider the pattern /A (B(*THEN)C) | D/ where A, B, C, and D are complex
1509 pattern fragments (but not containing any | characters). If A and B are
1510 matched, but there is a failure in C so that it backtracks to (*THEN), PCRE
1511 was behaving differently to Perl. PCRE backtracked into A, but Perl goes to
1512 D. In other words, Perl considers parentheses that do not contain any |
1513 characters to be part of a surrounding alternative, whereas PCRE was
1514 treading (B(*THEN)C) the same as (B(*THEN)C|(*FAIL)) -- which Perl handles
1515 differently. PCRE now behaves in the same way as Perl, except in the case
1516 of subroutine/recursion calls such as (?1) which have in any case always
1517 been different (but PCRE had them first :-).
1519 16. Related to 15 above: Perl does not treat the | in a conditional group as
1520 creating alternatives. Such a group is treated in the same way as an
1521 ordinary group without any | characters when processing (*THEN). PCRE has
1522 been changed to match Perl's behaviour.
1524 17. If a user had set PCREGREP_COLO(U)R to something other than 1:31, the
1525 RunGrepTest script failed.
1527 18. Change 22 for version 13 caused atomic groups to use more stack. This is
1528 inevitable for groups that contain captures, but it can lead to a lot of
1529 stack use in large patterns. The old behaviour has been restored for atomic
1530 groups that do not contain any capturing parentheses.
1532 19. If the PCRE_NO_START_OPTIMIZE option was set for pcre_compile(), it did not
1533 suppress the check for a minimum subject length at run time. (If it was
1534 given to pcre_exec() or pcre_dfa_exec() it did work.)
1536 20. Fixed an ASCII-dependent infelicity in pcretest that would have made it
1537 fail to work when decoding hex characters in data strings in EBCDIC
1540 21. It appears that in at least one Mac OS environment, the isxdigit() function
1541 is implemented as a macro that evaluates to its argument more than once,
1542 contravening the C 90 Standard (I haven't checked a later standard). There
1543 was an instance in pcretest which caused it to go wrong when processing
1544 \x{...} escapes in subject strings. The has been rewritten to avoid using
1545 things like p++ in the argument of isxdigit().
1548 Version 8.13 16-Aug-2011
1549 ------------------------
1551 1. The Unicode data tables have been updated to Unicode 6.0.0.
1553 2. Two minor typos in pcre_internal.h have been fixed.
1555 3. Added #include <string.h> to pcre_scanner_unittest.cc, pcrecpp.cc, and
1556 pcrecpp_unittest.cc. They are needed for strcmp(), memset(), and strchr()
1557 in some environments (e.g. Solaris 10/SPARC using Sun Studio 12U2).
1559 4. There were a number of related bugs in the code for matching backrefences
1560 caselessly in UTF-8 mode when codes for the characters concerned were
1561 different numbers of bytes. For example, U+023A and U+2C65 are an upper
1562 and lower case pair, using 2 and 3 bytes, respectively. The main bugs were:
1563 (a) A reference to 3 copies of a 2-byte code matched only 2 of a 3-byte
1564 code. (b) A reference to 2 copies of a 3-byte code would not match 2 of a
1565 2-byte code at the end of the subject (it thought there wasn't enough data
1568 5. Comprehensive information about what went wrong is now returned by
1569 pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec() when the UTF-8 string check fails, as long
1570 as the output vector has at least 2 elements. The offset of the start of
1571 the failing character and a reason code are placed in the vector.
1573 6. When the UTF-8 string check fails for pcre_compile(), the offset that is
1574 now returned is for the first byte of the failing character, instead of the
1575 last byte inspected. This is an incompatible change, but I hope it is small
1576 enough not to be a problem. It makes the returned offset consistent with
1577 pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec().
1579 7. pcretest now gives a text phrase as well as the error number when
1580 pcre_exec() or pcre_dfa_exec() fails; if the error is a UTF-8 check
1581 failure, the offset and reason code are output.
1583 8. When \R was used with a maximizing quantifier it failed to skip backwards
1584 over a \r\n pair if the subsequent match failed. Instead, it just skipped
1585 back over a single character (\n). This seems wrong (because it treated the
1586 two characters as a single entity when going forwards), conflicts with the
1587 documentation that \R is equivalent to (?>\r\n|\n|...etc), and makes the
1588 behaviour of \R* different to (\R)*, which also seems wrong. The behaviour
1591 9. Some internal refactoring has changed the processing so that the handling
1592 of the PCRE_CASELESS and PCRE_MULTILINE options is done entirely at compile
1593 time (the PCRE_DOTALL option was changed this way some time ago: version
1594 7.7 change 16). This has made it possible to abolish the OP_OPT op code,
1595 which was always a bit of a fudge. It also means that there is one less
1596 argument for the match() function, which reduces its stack requirements
1597 slightly. This change also fixes an incompatibility with Perl: the pattern
1598 (?i:([^b]))(?1) should not match "ab", but previously PCRE gave a match.
1600 10. More internal refactoring has drastically reduced the number of recursive
1601 calls to match() for possessively repeated groups such as (abc)++ when
1604 11. While implementing 10, a number of bugs in the handling of groups were
1605 discovered and fixed:
1607 (?<=(a)+) was not diagnosed as invalid (non-fixed-length lookbehind).
1608 (a|)*(?1) gave a compile-time internal error.
1609 ((a|)+)+ did not notice that the outer group could match an empty string.
1610 (^a|^)+ was not marked as anchored.
1611 (.*a|.*)+ was not marked as matching at start or after a newline.
1613 12. Yet more internal refactoring has removed another argument from the match()
1614 function. Special calls to this function are now indicated by setting a
1615 value in a variable in the "match data" data block.
1617 13. Be more explicit in pcre_study() instead of relying on "default" for
1618 opcodes that mean there is no starting character; this means that when new
1619 ones are added and accidentally left out of pcre_study(), testing should
1622 14. The -s option of pcretest has been documented for ages as being an old
1623 synonym of -m (show memory usage). I have changed it to mean "force study
1624 for every regex", that is, assume /S for every regex. This is similar to -i
1625 and -d etc. It's slightly incompatible, but I'm hoping nobody is still
1626 using it. It makes it easier to run collections of tests with and without
1627 study enabled, and thereby test pcre_study() more easily. All the standard
1628 tests are now run with and without -s (but some patterns can be marked as
1629 "never study" - see 20 below).
1631 15. When (*ACCEPT) was used in a subpattern that was called recursively, the
1632 restoration of the capturing data to the outer values was not happening
1635 16. If a recursively called subpattern ended with (*ACCEPT) and matched an
1636 empty string, and PCRE_NOTEMPTY was set, pcre_exec() thought the whole
1637 pattern had matched an empty string, and so incorrectly returned a no
1640 17. There was optimizing code for the last branch of non-capturing parentheses,
1641 and also for the obeyed branch of a conditional subexpression, which used
1642 tail recursion to cut down on stack usage. Unfortunately, now that there is
1643 the possibility of (*THEN) occurring in these branches, tail recursion is
1644 no longer possible because the return has to be checked for (*THEN). These
1645 two optimizations have therefore been removed. [But see 8.20/11 above.]
1647 18. If a pattern containing \R was studied, it was assumed that \R always
1648 matched two bytes, thus causing the minimum subject length to be
1649 incorrectly computed because \R can also match just one byte.
1651 19. If a pattern containing (*ACCEPT) was studied, the minimum subject length
1652 was incorrectly computed.
1654 20. If /S is present twice on a test pattern in pcretest input, it now
1655 *disables* studying, thereby overriding the use of -s on the command line
1656 (see 14 above). This is necessary for one or two tests to keep the output
1657 identical in both cases.
1659 21. When (*ACCEPT) was used in an assertion that matched an empty string and
1660 PCRE_NOTEMPTY was set, PCRE applied the non-empty test to the assertion.
1662 22. When an atomic group that contained a capturing parenthesis was
1663 successfully matched, but the branch in which it appeared failed, the
1664 capturing was not being forgotten if a higher numbered group was later
1665 captured. For example, /(?>(a))b|(a)c/ when matching "ac" set capturing
1666 group 1 to "a", when in fact it should be unset. This applied to multi-
1667 branched capturing and non-capturing groups, repeated or not, and also to
1668 positive assertions (capturing in negative assertions does not happen
1669 in PCRE) and also to nested atomic groups.
1671 23. Add the ++ qualifier feature to pcretest, to show the remainder of the
1672 subject after a captured substring, to make it easier to tell which of a
1673 number of identical substrings has been captured.
1675 24. The way atomic groups are processed by pcre_exec() has been changed so that
1676 if they are repeated, backtracking one repetition now resets captured
1677 values correctly. For example, if ((?>(a+)b)+aabab) is matched against
1678 "aaaabaaabaabab" the value of captured group 2 is now correctly recorded as
1679 "aaa". Previously, it would have been "a". As part of this code
1680 refactoring, the way recursive calls are handled has also been changed.
1682 25. If an assertion condition captured any substrings, they were not passed
1683 back unless some other capturing happened later. For example, if
1684 (?(?=(a))a) was matched against "a", no capturing was returned.
1686 26. When studying a pattern that contained subroutine calls or assertions,
1687 the code for finding the minimum length of a possible match was handling
1688 direct recursions such as (xxx(?1)|yyy) but not mutual recursions (where
1689 group 1 called group 2 while simultaneously a separate group 2 called group
1690 1). A stack overflow occurred in this case. I have fixed this by limiting
1691 the recursion depth to 10.
1693 27. Updated RunTest.bat in the distribution to the version supplied by Tom
1694 Fortmann. This supports explicit test numbers on the command line, and has
1695 argument validation and error reporting.
1697 28. An instance of \X with an unlimited repeat could fail if at any point the
1698 first character it looked at was a mark character.
1700 29. Some minor code refactoring concerning Unicode properties and scripts
1701 should reduce the stack requirement of match() slightly.
1703 30. Added the '=' option to pcretest to check the setting of unused capturing
1704 slots at the end of the pattern, which are documented as being -1, but are
1705 not included in the return count.
1707 31. If \k was not followed by a braced, angle-bracketed, or quoted name, PCRE
1708 compiled something random. Now it gives a compile-time error (as does
1711 32. A *MARK encountered during the processing of a positive assertion is now
1712 recorded and passed back (compatible with Perl).
1714 33. If --only-matching or --colour was set on a pcregrep call whose pattern
1715 had alternative anchored branches, the search for a second match in a line
1716 was done as if at the line start. Thus, for example, /^01|^02/ incorrectly
1717 matched the line "0102" twice. The same bug affected patterns that started
1718 with a backwards assertion. For example /\b01|\b02/ also matched "0102"
1721 34. Previously, PCRE did not allow quantification of assertions. However, Perl
1722 does, and because of capturing effects, quantifying parenthesized
1723 assertions may at times be useful. Quantifiers are now allowed for
1724 parenthesized assertions.
1726 35. A minor code tidy in pcre_compile() when checking options for \R usage.
1728 36. \g was being checked for fancy things in a character class, when it should
1729 just be a literal "g".
1731 37. PCRE was rejecting [:a[:digit:]] whereas Perl was not. It seems that the
1732 appearance of a nested POSIX class supersedes an apparent external class.
1733 For example, [:a[:digit:]b:] matches "a", "b", ":", or a digit. Also,
1734 unescaped square brackets may also appear as part of class names. For
1735 example, [:a[:abc]b:] gives unknown class "[:abc]b:]". PCRE now behaves
1736 more like Perl. (But see 8.20/1 above.)
1738 38. PCRE was giving an error for \N with a braced quantifier such as {1,} (this
1739 was because it thought it was \N{name}, which is not supported).
1741 39. Add minix to OS list not supporting the -S option in pcretest.
1743 40. PCRE tries to detect cases of infinite recursion at compile time, but it
1744 cannot analyze patterns in sufficient detail to catch mutual recursions
1745 such as ((?1))((?2)). There is now a runtime test that gives an error if a
1746 subgroup is called recursively as a subpattern for a second time at the
1747 same position in the subject string. In previous releases this might have
1748 been caught by the recursion limit, or it might have run out of stack.
1750 41. A pattern such as /(?(R)a+|(?R)b)/ is quite safe, as the recursion can
1751 happen only once. PCRE was, however incorrectly giving a compile time error
1752 "recursive call could loop indefinitely" because it cannot analyze the
1753 pattern in sufficient detail. The compile time test no longer happens when
1754 PCRE is compiling a conditional subpattern, but actual runaway loops are
1755 now caught at runtime (see 40 above).
1757 42. It seems that Perl allows any characters other than a closing parenthesis
1758 to be part of the NAME in (*MARK:NAME) and other backtracking verbs. PCRE
1759 has been changed to be the same.
1761 43. Updated configure.ac to put in more quoting round AC_LANG_PROGRAM etc. so
1762 as not to get warnings when autogen.sh is called. Also changed
1763 AC_PROG_LIBTOOL (deprecated) to LT_INIT (the current macro).
1765 44. To help people who use pcregrep to scan files containing exceedingly long
1766 lines, the following changes have been made:
1768 (a) The default value of the buffer size parameter has been increased from
1769 8K to 20K. (The actual buffer used is three times this size.)
1771 (b) The default can be changed by ./configure --with-pcregrep-bufsize when
1774 (c) A --buffer-size=n option has been added to pcregrep, to allow the size
1775 to be set at run time.
1777 (d) Numerical values in pcregrep options can be followed by K or M, for
1778 example --buffer-size=50K.
1780 (e) If a line being scanned overflows pcregrep's buffer, an error is now
1781 given and the return code is set to 2.
1783 45. Add a pointer to the latest mark to the callout data block.
1785 46. The pattern /.(*F)/, when applied to "abc" with PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD, gave a
1786 partial match of an empty string instead of no match. This was specific to
1789 47. The pattern /f.*/8s, when applied to "for" with PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD, gave a
1790 complete match instead of a partial match. This bug was dependent on both
1791 the PCRE_UTF8 and PCRE_DOTALL options being set.
1793 48. For a pattern such as /\babc|\bdef/ pcre_study() was failing to set up the
1794 starting byte set, because \b was not being ignored.
1797 Version 8.12 15-Jan-2011
1798 ------------------------
1800 1. Fixed some typos in the markup of the man pages, and wrote a script that
1801 checks for such things as part of the documentation building process.
1803 2. On a big-endian 64-bit system, pcregrep did not correctly process the
1804 --match-limit and --recursion-limit options (added for 8.11). In
1805 particular, this made one of the standard tests fail. (The integer value
1806 went into the wrong half of a long int.)
1808 3. If the --colour option was given to pcregrep with -v (invert match), it
1809 did strange things, either producing crazy output, or crashing. It should,
1810 of course, ignore a request for colour when reporting lines that do not
1813 4. Another pcregrep bug caused similar problems if --colour was specified with
1814 -M (multiline) and the pattern match finished with a line ending.
1816 5. In pcregrep, when a pattern that ended with a literal newline sequence was
1817 matched in multiline mode, the following line was shown as part of the
1818 match. This seems wrong, so I have changed it.
1820 6. Another pcregrep bug in multiline mode, when --colour was specified, caused
1821 the check for further matches in the same line (so they could be coloured)
1822 to overrun the end of the current line. If another match was found, it was
1823 incorrectly shown (and then shown again when found in the next line).
1825 7. If pcregrep was compiled under Windows, there was a reference to the
1826 function pcregrep_exit() before it was defined. I am assuming this was
1827 the cause of the "error C2371: 'pcregrep_exit' : redefinition;" that was
1828 reported by a user. I've moved the definition above the reference.
1831 Version 8.11 10-Dec-2010
1832 ------------------------
1834 1. (*THEN) was not working properly if there were untried alternatives prior
1835 to it in the current branch. For example, in ((a|b)(*THEN)(*F)|c..) it
1836 backtracked to try for "b" instead of moving to the next alternative branch
1837 at the same level (in this case, to look for "c"). The Perl documentation
1838 is clear that when (*THEN) is backtracked onto, it goes to the "next
1839 alternative in the innermost enclosing group".
1841 2. (*COMMIT) was not overriding (*THEN), as it does in Perl. In a pattern
1842 such as (A(*COMMIT)B(*THEN)C|D) any failure after matching A should
1843 result in overall failure. Similarly, (*COMMIT) now overrides (*PRUNE) and
1844 (*SKIP), (*SKIP) overrides (*PRUNE) and (*THEN), and (*PRUNE) overrides
1847 3. If \s appeared in a character class, it removed the VT character from
1848 the class, even if it had been included by some previous item, for example
1849 in [\x00-\xff\s]. (This was a bug related to the fact that VT is not part
1850 of \s, but is part of the POSIX "space" class.)
1852 4. A partial match never returns an empty string (because you can always
1853 match an empty string at the end of the subject); however the checking for
1854 an empty string was starting at the "start of match" point. This has been
1855 changed to the "earliest inspected character" point, because the returned
1856 data for a partial match starts at this character. This means that, for
1857 example, /(?<=abc)def/ gives a partial match for the subject "abc"
1858 (previously it gave "no match").
1860 5. Changes have been made to the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching
1861 of $, \z, \Z, \b, and \B. If the match point is at the end of the string,
1862 previously a full match would be given. However, setting PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD
1863 has an implication that the given string is incomplete (because a partial
1864 match is preferred over a full match). For this reason, these items now
1865 give a partial match in this situation. [Aside: previously, the one case
1866 /t\b/ matched against "cat" with PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD set did return a partial
1867 match rather than a full match, which was wrong by the old rules, but is
1870 6. There was a bug in the handling of #-introduced comments, recognized when
1871 PCRE_EXTENDED is set, when PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY and PCRE_UTF8 were also set.
1872 If a UTF-8 multi-byte character included the byte 0x85 (e.g. +U0445, whose
1873 UTF-8 encoding is 0xd1,0x85), this was misinterpreted as a newline when
1874 scanning for the end of the comment. (*Character* 0x85 is an "any" newline,
1875 but *byte* 0x85 is not, in UTF-8 mode). This bug was present in several
1876 places in pcre_compile().
1878 7. Related to (6) above, when pcre_compile() was skipping #-introduced
1879 comments when looking ahead for named forward references to subpatterns,
1880 the only newline sequence it recognized was NL. It now handles newlines
1881 according to the set newline convention.
1883 8. SunOS4 doesn't have strerror() or strtoul(); pcregrep dealt with the
1884 former, but used strtoul(), whereas pcretest avoided strtoul() but did not
1885 cater for a lack of strerror(). These oversights have been fixed.
1887 9. Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep.
1889 10. Added two casts needed to build with Visual Studio when NO_RECURSE is set.
1891 11. When the -o option was used, pcregrep was setting a return code of 1, even
1892 when matches were found, and --line-buffered was not being honoured.
1894 12. Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options
1897 13. Imitating Perl's /g action for multiple matches is tricky when the pattern
1898 can match an empty string. The code to do it in pcretest and pcredemo
1901 (a) When the newline convention was "crlf", pcretest got it wrong, skipping
1902 only one byte after an empty string match just before CRLF (this case
1903 just got forgotten; "any" and "anycrlf" were OK).
1905 (b) The pcretest code also had a bug, causing it to loop forever in UTF-8
1906 mode when an empty string match preceded an ASCII character followed by
1907 a non-ASCII character. (The code for advancing by one character rather
1908 than one byte was nonsense.)
1910 (c) The pcredemo.c sample program did not have any code at all to handle
1911 the cases when CRLF is a valid newline sequence.
1913 14. Neither pcre_exec() nor pcre_dfa_exec() was checking that the value given
1914 as a starting offset was within the subject string. There is now a new
1915 error, PCRE_ERROR_BADOFFSET, which is returned if the starting offset is
1916 negative or greater than the length of the string. In order to test this,
1917 pcretest is extended to allow the setting of negative starting offsets.
1919 15. In both pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec() the code for checking that the
1920 starting offset points to the beginning of a UTF-8 character was
1921 unnecessarily clumsy. I tidied it up.
1923 16. Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a
1924 bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD.
1926 17. Nobody had reported that the --include_dir option, which was added in
1927 release 7.7 should have been called --include-dir (hyphen, not underscore)
1928 for compatibility with GNU grep. I have changed it to --include-dir, but
1929 left --include_dir as an undocumented synonym, and the same for
1930 --exclude-dir, though that is not available in GNU grep, at least as of
1933 18. At a user's suggestion, the macros GETCHAR and friends (which pick up UTF-8
1934 characters from a string of bytes) have been redefined so as not to use
1935 loops, in order to improve performance in some environments. At the same
1936 time, I abstracted some of the common code into auxiliary macros to save
1937 repetition (this should not affect the compiled code).
1939 19. If \c was followed by a multibyte UTF-8 character, bad things happened. A
1940 compile-time error is now given if \c is not followed by an ASCII
1941 character, that is, a byte less than 128. (In EBCDIC mode, the code is
1942 different, and any byte value is allowed.)
1944 20. Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_
1945 START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time - but just
1946 passed through to pcre_exec() or pcre_dfa_exec(). This makes it available
1947 to pcregrep and other applications that have no direct access to PCRE
1948 options. The new /Y option in pcretest sets this option when calling
1951 21. Change 18 of release 8.01 broke the use of named subpatterns for recursive
1952 back references. Groups containing recursive back references were forced to
1953 be atomic by that change, but in the case of named groups, the amount of
1954 memory required was incorrectly computed, leading to "Failed: internal
1955 error: code overflow". This has been fixed.
1957 22. Some patches to pcre_stringpiece.h, pcre_stringpiece_unittest.cc, and
1958 pcretest.c, to avoid build problems in some Borland environments.
1961 Version 8.10 25-Jun-2010
1962 ------------------------
1964 1. Added support for (*MARK:ARG) and for ARG additions to PRUNE, SKIP, and
1967 2. (*ACCEPT) was not working when inside an atomic group.
1969 3. Inside a character class, \B is treated as a literal by default, but
1970 faulted if PCRE_EXTRA is set. This mimics Perl's behaviour (the -w option
1971 causes the error). The code is unchanged, but I tidied the documentation.
1973 4. Inside a character class, PCRE always treated \R and \X as literals,
1974 whereas Perl faults them if its -w option is set. I have changed PCRE so
1975 that it faults them when PCRE_EXTRA is set.
1977 5. Added support for \N, which always matches any character other than
1978 newline. (It is the same as "." when PCRE_DOTALL is not set.)
1980 6. When compiling pcregrep with newer versions of gcc which may have
1981 FORTIFY_SOURCE set, several warnings "ignoring return value of 'fwrite',
1982 declared with attribute warn_unused_result" were given. Just casting the
1983 result to (void) does not stop the warnings; a more elaborate fudge is
1984 needed. I've used a macro to implement this.
1986 7. Minor change to pcretest.c to avoid a compiler warning.
1988 8. Added four artifical Unicode properties to help with an option to make
1989 \s etc use properties (see next item). The new properties are: Xan
1990 (alphanumeric), Xsp (Perl space), Xps (POSIX space), and Xwd (word).
1992 9. Added PCRE_UCP to make \b, \d, \s, \w, and certain POSIX character classes
1993 use Unicode properties. (*UCP) at the start of a pattern can be used to set
1994 this option. Modified pcretest to add /W to test this facility. Added
1995 REG_UCP to make it available via the POSIX interface.
1997 10. Added --line-buffered to pcregrep.
1999 11. In UTF-8 mode, if a pattern that was compiled with PCRE_CASELESS was
2000 studied, and the match started with a letter with a code point greater than
2001 127 whose first byte was different to the first byte of the other case of
2002 the letter, the other case of this starting letter was not recognized
2005 12. If a pattern that was studied started with a repeated Unicode property
2006 test, for example, \p{Nd}+, there was the theoretical possibility of
2007 setting up an incorrect bitmap of starting bytes, but fortunately it could
2008 not have actually happened in practice until change 8 above was made (it
2009 added property types that matched character-matching opcodes).
2011 13. pcre_study() now recognizes \h, \v, and \R when constructing a bit map of
2012 possible starting bytes for non-anchored patterns.
2014 14. Extended the "auto-possessify" feature of pcre_compile(). It now recognizes
2015 \R, and also a number of cases that involve Unicode properties, both
2016 explicit and implicit when PCRE_UCP is set.
2018 15. If a repeated Unicode property match (e.g. \p{Lu}*) was used with non-UTF-8
2019 input, it could crash or give wrong results if characters with values
2020 greater than 0xc0 were present in the subject string. (Detail: it assumed
2021 UTF-8 input when processing these items.)
2023 16. Added a lot of (int) casts to avoid compiler warnings in systems where
2024 size_t is 64-bit (#991).
2026 17. Added a check for running out of memory when PCRE is compiled with
2027 --disable-stack-for-recursion (#990).
2029 18. If the last data line in a file for pcretest does not have a newline on
2030 the end, a newline was missing in the output.
2032 19. The default pcre_chartables.c file recognizes only ASCII characters (values
2033 less than 128) in its various bitmaps. However, there is a facility for
2034 generating tables according to the current locale when PCRE is compiled. It
2035 turns out that in some environments, 0x85 and 0xa0, which are Unicode space
2036 characters, are recognized by isspace() and therefore were getting set in
2037 these tables, and indeed these tables seem to approximate to ISO 8859. This
2038 caused a problem in UTF-8 mode when pcre_study() was used to create a list
2039 of bytes that can start a match. For \s, it was including 0x85 and 0xa0,
2040 which of course cannot start UTF-8 characters. I have changed the code so
2041 that only real ASCII characters (less than 128) and the correct starting
2042 bytes for UTF-8 encodings are set for characters greater than 127 when in
2043 UTF-8 mode. (When PCRE_UCP is set - see 9 above - the code is different
2046 20. Added the /T option to pcretest so as to be able to run tests with non-
2047 standard character tables, thus making it possible to include the tests
2048 used for 19 above in the standard set of tests.
2050 21. A pattern such as (?&t)(?#()(?(DEFINE)(?<t>a)) which has a forward
2051 reference to a subpattern the other side of a comment that contains an
2052 opening parenthesis caused either an internal compiling error, or a
2053 reference to the wrong subpattern.
2056 Version 8.02 19-Mar-2010
2057 ------------------------
2059 1. The Unicode data tables have been updated to Unicode 5.2.0.
2061 2. Added the option --libs-cpp to pcre-config, but only when C++ support is
2064 3. Updated the licensing terms in the pcregexp.pas file, as agreed with the
2065 original author of that file, following a query about its status.
2067 4. On systems that do not have stdint.h (e.g. Solaris), check for and include
2068 inttypes.h instead. This fixes a bug that was introduced by change 8.01/8.
2070 5. A pattern such as (?&t)*+(?(DEFINE)(?<t>.)) which has a possessive
2071 quantifier applied to a forward-referencing subroutine call, could compile
2072 incorrect code or give the error "internal error: previously-checked
2073 referenced subpattern not found".
2075 6. Both MS Visual Studio and Symbian OS have problems with initializing
2076 variables to point to external functions. For these systems, therefore,
2077 pcre_malloc etc. are now initialized to local functions that call the
2078 relevant global functions.
2080 7. There were two entries missing in the vectors called coptable and poptable
2081 in pcre_dfa_exec.c. This could lead to memory accesses outsize the vectors.
2082 I've fixed the data, and added a kludgy way of testing at compile time that
2083 the lengths are correct (equal to the number of opcodes).
2085 8. Following on from 7, I added a similar kludge to check the length of the
2086 eint vector in pcreposix.c.
2088 9. Error texts for pcre_compile() are held as one long string to avoid too
2089 much relocation at load time. To find a text, the string is searched,
2090 counting zeros. There was no check for running off the end of the string,
2091 which could happen if a new error number was added without updating the
2094 10. \K gave a compile-time error if it appeared in a lookbehind assersion.
2096 11. \K was not working if it appeared in an atomic group or in a group that
2097 was called as a "subroutine", or in an assertion. Perl 5.11 documents that
2098 \K is "not well defined" if used in an assertion. PCRE now accepts it if
2099 the assertion is positive, but not if it is negative.
2101 12. Change 11 fortuitously reduced the size of the stack frame used in the
2102 "match()" function of pcre_exec.c by one pointer. Forthcoming
2103 implementation of support for (*MARK) will need an extra pointer on the
2104 stack; I have reserved it now, so that the stack frame size does not
2107 13. A pattern such as (?P<L1>(?P<L2>0)|(?P>L2)(?P>L1)) in which the only other
2108 item in branch that calls a recursion is a subroutine call - as in the
2109 second branch in the above example - was incorrectly given the compile-
2110 time error "recursive call could loop indefinitely" because pcre_compile()
2111 was not correctly checking the subroutine for matching a non-empty string.
2113 14. The checks for overrunning compiling workspace could trigger after an
2114 overrun had occurred. This is a "should never occur" error, but it can be
2115 triggered by pathological patterns such as hundreds of nested parentheses.
2116 The checks now trigger 100 bytes before the end of the workspace.
2118 15. Fix typo in configure.ac: "srtoq" should be "strtoq".
2121 Version 8.01 19-Jan-2010
2122 ------------------------
2124 1. If a pattern contained a conditional subpattern with only one branch (in
2125 particular, this includes all (*DEFINE) patterns), a call to pcre_study()
2126 computed the wrong minimum data length (which is of course zero for such
2127 subpatterns). This could cause incorrect "no match" results.
2129 2. For patterns such as (?i)a(?-i)b|c where an option setting at the start of
2130 the pattern is reset in the first branch, pcre_compile() failed with
2131 "internal error: code overflow at offset...". This happened only when
2132 the reset was to the original external option setting. (An optimization
2133 abstracts leading options settings into an external setting, which was the
2136 3. A pattern such as ^(?!a(*SKIP)b) where a negative assertion contained one
2137 of the verbs SKIP, PRUNE, or COMMIT, did not work correctly. When the
2138 assertion pattern did not match (meaning that the assertion was true), it
2139 was incorrectly treated as false if the SKIP had been reached during the
2140 matching. This also applied to assertions used as conditions.
2142 4. If an item that is not supported by pcre_dfa_exec() was encountered in an
2143 assertion subpattern, including such a pattern used as a condition,
2144 unpredictable results occurred, instead of the error return
2145 PCRE_ERROR_DFA_UITEM.
2147 5. The C++ GlobalReplace function was not working like Perl for the special
2148 situation when an empty string is matched. It now does the fancy magic
2149 stuff that is necessary.
2151 6. In pcre_internal.h, obsolete includes to setjmp.h and stdarg.h have been
2152 removed. (These were left over from very, very early versions of PCRE.)
2154 7. Some cosmetic changes to the code to make life easier when compiling it
2155 as part of something else:
2157 (a) Change DEBUG to PCRE_DEBUG.
2159 (b) In pcre_compile(), rename the member of the "branch_chain" structure
2160 called "current" as "current_branch", to prevent a collision with the
2161 Linux macro when compiled as a kernel module.
2163 (c) In pcre_study(), rename the function set_bit() as set_table_bit(), to
2164 prevent a collision with the Linux macro when compiled as a kernel
2167 8. In pcre_compile() there are some checks for integer overflows that used to
2168 cast potentially large values to (double). This has been changed to that
2169 when building, a check for int64_t is made, and if it is found, it is used
2170 instead, thus avoiding the use of floating point arithmetic. (There is no
2171 other use of FP in PCRE.) If int64_t is not found, the fallback is to
2174 9. Added two casts to avoid signed/unsigned warnings from VS Studio Express
2175 2005 (difference between two addresses compared to an unsigned value).
2177 10. Change the standard AC_CHECK_LIB test for libbz2 in configure.ac to a
2178 custom one, because of the following reported problem in Windows:
2180 - libbz2 uses the Pascal calling convention (WINAPI) for the functions
2182 - The standard autoconf AC_CHECK_LIB fails to include "bzlib.h",
2183 therefore missing the function definition.
2184 - The compiler thus generates a "C" signature for the test function.
2185 - The linker fails to find the "C" function.
2186 - PCRE fails to configure if asked to do so against libbz2.
2188 11. When running libtoolize from libtool-2.2.6b as part of autogen.sh, these
2189 messages were output:
2191 Consider adding `AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])' to configure.ac and
2192 rerunning libtoolize, to keep the correct libtool macros in-tree.
2193 Consider adding `-I m4' to ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS in Makefile.am.
2195 I have done both of these things.
2197 12. Although pcre_dfa_exec() does not use nearly as much stack as pcre_exec()
2198 most of the time, it *can* run out if it is given a pattern that contains a
2199 runaway infinite recursion. I updated the discussion in the pcrestack man
2202 13. Now that we have gone to the x.xx style of version numbers, the minor
2203 version may start with zero. Using 08 or 09 is a bad idea because users
2204 might check the value of PCRE_MINOR in their code, and 08 or 09 may be
2205 interpreted as invalid octal numbers. I've updated the previous comment in
2206 configure.ac, and also added a check that gives an error if 08 or 09 are
2209 14. Change 8.00/11 was not quite complete: code had been accidentally omitted,
2210 causing partial matching to fail when the end of the subject matched \W
2211 in a UTF-8 pattern where \W was quantified with a minimum of 3.
2213 15. There were some discrepancies between the declarations in pcre_internal.h
2214 of _pcre_is_newline(), _pcre_was_newline(), and _pcre_valid_utf8() and
2215 their definitions. The declarations used "const uschar *" and the
2216 definitions used USPTR. Even though USPTR is normally defined as "const
2217 unsigned char *" (and uschar is typedeffed as "unsigned char"), it was
2218 reported that: "This difference in casting confuses some C++ compilers, for
2219 example, SunCC recognizes above declarations as different functions and
2220 generates broken code for hbpcre." I have changed the declarations to use
2223 16. GNU libtool is named differently on some systems. The autogen.sh script now
2224 tries several variants such as glibtoolize (MacOSX) and libtoolize1x
2227 17. Applied Craig's patch that fixes an HP aCC compile error in pcre 8.00
2228 (strtoXX undefined when compiling pcrecpp.cc). The patch contains this
2229 comment: "Figure out how to create a longlong from a string: strtoll and
2230 equivalent. It's not enough to call AC_CHECK_FUNCS: hpux has a strtoll, for
2231 instance, but it only takes 2 args instead of 3!"
2233 18. A subtle bug concerned with back references has been fixed by a change of
2234 specification, with a corresponding code fix. A pattern such as
2235 ^(xa|=?\1a)+$ which contains a back reference inside the group to which it
2236 refers, was giving matches when it shouldn't. For example, xa=xaaa would
2237 match that pattern. Interestingly, Perl (at least up to 5.11.3) has the
2238 same bug. Such groups have to be quantified to be useful, or contained
2239 inside another quantified group. (If there's no repetition, the reference
2240 can never match.) The problem arises because, having left the group and
2241 moved on to the rest of the pattern, a later failure that backtracks into
2242 the group uses the captured value from the final iteration of the group
2243 rather than the correct earlier one. I have fixed this in PCRE by forcing
2244 any group that contains a reference to itself to be an atomic group; that
2245 is, there cannot be any backtracking into it once it has completed. This is
2246 similar to recursive and subroutine calls.
2249 Version 8.00 19-Oct-09
2250 ----------------------
2252 1. The table for translating pcre_compile() error codes into POSIX error codes
2253 was out-of-date, and there was no check on the pcre_compile() error code
2254 being within the table. This could lead to an OK return being given in
2257 2. Changed the call to open a subject file in pcregrep from fopen(pathname,
2258 "r") to fopen(pathname, "rb"), which fixed a problem with some of the tests
2259 in a Windows environment.
2261 3. The pcregrep --count option prints the count for each file even when it is
2262 zero, as does GNU grep. However, pcregrep was also printing all files when
2263 --files-with-matches was added. Now, when both options are given, it prints
2264 counts only for those files that have at least one match. (GNU grep just
2265 prints the file name in this circumstance, but including the count seems
2266 more useful - otherwise, why use --count?) Also ensured that the
2267 combination -clh just lists non-zero counts, with no names.
2269 4. The long form of the pcregrep -F option was incorrectly implemented as
2270 --fixed_strings instead of --fixed-strings. This is an incompatible change,
2271 but it seems right to fix it, and I didn't think it was worth preserving
2274 5. The command line items --regex=pattern and --regexp=pattern were not
2275 recognized by pcregrep, which required --regex pattern or --regexp pattern
2276 (with a space rather than an '='). The man page documented the '=' forms,
2277 which are compatible with GNU grep; these now work.
2279 6. No libpcreposix.pc file was created for pkg-config; there was just
2280 libpcre.pc and libpcrecpp.pc. The omission has been rectified.
2282 7. Added #ifndef SUPPORT_UCP into the pcre_ucd.c module, to reduce its size
2283 when UCP support is not needed, by modifying the Python script that
2284 generates it from Unicode data files. This should not matter if the module
2285 is correctly used as a library, but I received one complaint about 50K of
2286 unwanted data. My guess is that the person linked everything into his
2287 program rather than using a library. Anyway, it does no harm.
2289 8. A pattern such as /\x{123}{2,2}+/8 was incorrectly compiled; the trigger
2290 was a minimum greater than 1 for a wide character in a possessive
2291 repetition. The same bug could also affect patterns like /(\x{ff}{0,2})*/8
2292 which had an unlimited repeat of a nested, fixed maximum repeat of a wide
2293 character. Chaos in the form of incorrect output or a compiling loop could
2296 9. The restrictions on what a pattern can contain when partial matching is
2297 requested for pcre_exec() have been removed. All patterns can now be
2298 partially matched by this function. In addition, if there are at least two
2299 slots in the offset vector, the offset of the earliest inspected character
2300 for the match and the offset of the end of the subject are set in them when
2301 PCRE_ERROR_PARTIAL is returned.
2303 10. Partial matching has been split into two forms: PCRE_PARTIAL_SOFT, which is
2304 synonymous with PCRE_PARTIAL, for backwards compatibility, and
2305 PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD, which causes a partial match to supersede a full match,
2306 and may be more useful for multi-segment matching.
2308 11. Partial matching with pcre_exec() is now more intuitive. A partial match
2309 used to be given if ever the end of the subject was reached; now it is
2310 given only if matching could not proceed because another character was
2311 needed. This makes a difference in some odd cases such as Z(*FAIL) with the
2312 string "Z", which now yields "no match" instead of "partial match". In the
2313 case of pcre_dfa_exec(), "no match" is given if every matching path for the
2314 final character ended with (*FAIL).
2316 12. Restarting a match using pcre_dfa_exec() after a partial match did not work
2317 if the pattern had a "must contain" character that was already found in the
2318 earlier partial match, unless partial matching was again requested. For
2319 example, with the pattern /dog.(body)?/, the "must contain" character is
2320 "g". If the first part-match was for the string "dog", restarting with
2321 "sbody" failed. This bug has been fixed.
2323 13. The string returned by pcre_dfa_exec() after a partial match has been
2324 changed so that it starts at the first inspected character rather than the
2325 first character of the match. This makes a difference only if the pattern
2326 starts with a lookbehind assertion or \b or \B (\K is not supported by
2327 pcre_dfa_exec()). It's an incompatible change, but it makes the two
2328 matching functions compatible, and I think it's the right thing to do.
2330 14. Added a pcredemo man page, created automatically from the pcredemo.c file,
2331 so that the demonstration program is easily available in environments where
2332 PCRE has not been installed from source.
2334 15. Arranged to add -DPCRE_STATIC to cflags in libpcre.pc, libpcreposix.cp,
2335 libpcrecpp.pc and pcre-config when PCRE is not compiled as a shared
2338 16. Added REG_UNGREEDY to the pcreposix interface, at the request of a user.
2339 It maps to PCRE_UNGREEDY. It is not, of course, POSIX-compatible, but it
2340 is not the first non-POSIX option to be added. Clearly some people find
2341 these options useful.
2343 17. If a caller to the POSIX matching function regexec() passes a non-zero
2344 value for nmatch with a NULL value for pmatch, the value of
2345 nmatch is forced to zero.
2347 18. RunGrepTest did not have a test for the availability of the -u option of
2348 the diff command, as RunTest does. It now checks in the same way as
2349 RunTest, and also checks for the -b option.
2351 19. If an odd number of negated classes containing just a single character
2352 interposed, within parentheses, between a forward reference to a named
2353 subpattern and the definition of the subpattern, compilation crashed with
2354 an internal error, complaining that it could not find the referenced
2355 subpattern. An example of a crashing pattern is /(?&A)(([^m])(?<A>))/.
2356 [The bug was that it was starting one character too far in when skipping
2357 over the character class, thus treating the ] as data rather than
2358 terminating the class. This meant it could skip too much.]
2360 20. Added PCRE_NOTEMPTY_ATSTART in order to be able to correctly implement the
2361 /g option in pcretest when the pattern contains \K, which makes it possible
2362 to have an empty string match not at the start, even when the pattern is
2363 anchored. Updated pcretest and pcredemo to use this option.
2365 21. If the maximum number of capturing subpatterns in a recursion was greater
2366 than the maximum at the outer level, the higher number was returned, but
2367 with unset values at the outer level. The correct (outer level) value is
2370 22. If (*ACCEPT) appeared inside capturing parentheses, previous releases of
2371 PCRE did not set those parentheses (unlike Perl). I have now found a way to
2372 make it do so. The string so far is captured, making this feature
2373 compatible with Perl.
2375 23. The tests have been re-organized, adding tests 11 and 12, to make it
2376 possible to check the Perl 5.10 features against Perl 5.10.
2378 24. Perl 5.10 allows subroutine calls in lookbehinds, as long as the subroutine
2379 pattern matches a fixed length string. PCRE did not allow this; now it
2380 does. Neither allows recursion.
2382 25. I finally figured out how to implement a request to provide the minimum
2383 length of subject string that was needed in order to match a given pattern.
2384 (It was back references and recursion that I had previously got hung up
2385 on.) This code has now been added to pcre_study(); it finds a lower bound
2386 to the length of subject needed. It is not necessarily the greatest lower
2387 bound, but using it to avoid searching strings that are too short does give
2388 some useful speed-ups. The value is available to calling programs via
2391 26. While implementing 25, I discovered to my embarrassment that pcretest had
2392 not been passing the result of pcre_study() to pcre_dfa_exec(), so the
2393 study optimizations had never been tested with that matching function.
2394 Oops. What is worse, even when it was passed study data, there was a bug in
2395 pcre_dfa_exec() that meant it never actually used it. Double oops. There
2396 were also very few tests of studied patterns with pcre_dfa_exec().
2398 27. If (?| is used to create subpatterns with duplicate numbers, they are now
2399 allowed to have the same name, even if PCRE_DUPNAMES is not set. However,
2400 on the other side of the coin, they are no longer allowed to have different
2401 names, because these cannot be distinguished in PCRE, and this has caused
2402 confusion. (This is a difference from Perl.)
2404 28. When duplicate subpattern names are present (necessarily with different
2405 numbers, as required by 27 above), and a test is made by name in a
2406 conditional pattern, either for a subpattern having been matched, or for
2407 recursion in such a pattern, all the associated numbered subpatterns are
2408 tested, and the overall condition is true if the condition is true for any
2409 one of them. This is the way Perl works, and is also more like the way
2410 testing by number works.
2413 Version 7.9 11-Apr-09
2414 ---------------------
2416 1. When building with support for bzlib/zlib (pcregrep) and/or readline
2417 (pcretest), all targets were linked against these libraries. This included
2418 libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp, even though they do not use these
2419 libraries. This caused unwanted dependencies to be created. This problem
2420 has been fixed, and now only pcregrep is linked with bzlib/zlib and only
2421 pcretest is linked with readline.
2423 2. The "typedef int BOOL" in pcre_internal.h that was included inside the
2424 "#ifndef FALSE" condition by an earlier change (probably 7.8/18) has been
2425 moved outside it again, because FALSE and TRUE are already defined in AIX,
2428 3. The pcre_config() function was treating the PCRE_MATCH_LIMIT and
2429 PCRE_MATCH_LIMIT_RECURSION values as ints, when they should be long ints.
2431 4. The pcregrep documentation said spaces were inserted as well as colons (or
2432 hyphens) following file names and line numbers when outputting matching
2433 lines. This is not true; no spaces are inserted. I have also clarified the
2434 wording for the --colour (or --color) option.
2436 5. In pcregrep, when --colour was used with -o, the list of matching strings
2437 was not coloured; this is different to GNU grep, so I have changed it to be
2440 6. When --colo(u)r was used in pcregrep, only the first matching substring in
2441 each matching line was coloured. Now it goes on to look for further matches
2442 of any of the test patterns, which is the same behaviour as GNU grep.
2444 7. A pattern that could match an empty string could cause pcregrep to loop; it
2445 doesn't make sense to accept an empty string match in pcregrep, so I have
2446 locked it out (using PCRE's PCRE_NOTEMPTY option). By experiment, this
2447 seems to be how GNU grep behaves. [But see later change 40 for release
2450 8. The pattern (?(?=.*b)b|^) was incorrectly compiled as "match must be at
2451 start or after a newline", because the conditional assertion was not being
2452 correctly handled. The rule now is that both the assertion and what follows
2453 in the first alternative must satisfy the test.
2455 9. If auto-callout was enabled in a pattern with a conditional group whose
2456 condition was an assertion, PCRE could crash during matching, both with
2457 pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec().
2459 10. The PCRE_DOLLAR_ENDONLY option was not working when pcre_dfa_exec() was
2462 11. Unicode property support in character classes was not working for
2463 characters (bytes) greater than 127 when not in UTF-8 mode.
2465 12. Added the -M command line option to pcretest.
2467 14. Added the non-standard REG_NOTEMPTY option to the POSIX interface.
2469 15. Added the PCRE_NO_START_OPTIMIZE match-time option.
2471 16. Added comments and documentation about mis-use of no_arg in the C++
2474 17. Implemented support for UTF-8 encoding in EBCDIC environments, a patch
2475 from Martin Jerabek that uses macro names for all relevant character and
2478 18. Added to pcre_internal.h two configuration checks: (a) If both EBCDIC and
2479 SUPPORT_UTF8 are set, give an error; (b) If SUPPORT_UCP is set without
2480 SUPPORT_UTF8, define SUPPORT_UTF8. The "configure" script handles both of
2481 these, but not everybody uses configure.
2483 19. A conditional group that had only one branch was not being correctly
2484 recognized as an item that could match an empty string. This meant that an
2485 enclosing group might also not be so recognized, causing infinite looping
2486 (and probably a segfault) for patterns such as ^"((?(?=[a])[^"])|b)*"$
2487 with the subject "ab", where knowledge that the repeated group can match
2488 nothing is needed in order to break the loop.
2490 20. If a pattern that was compiled with callouts was matched using pcre_dfa_
2491 exec(), but without supplying a callout function, matching went wrong.
2493 21. If PCRE_ERROR_MATCHLIMIT occurred during a recursion, there was a memory
2494 leak if the size of the offset vector was greater than 30. When the vector
2495 is smaller, the saved offsets during recursion go onto a local stack
2496 vector, but for larger vectors malloc() is used. It was failing to free
2497 when the recursion yielded PCRE_ERROR_MATCH_LIMIT (or any other "abnormal"
2500 22. There was a missing #ifdef SUPPORT_UTF8 round one of the variables in the
2501 heapframe that is used only when UTF-8 support is enabled. This caused no
2502 problem, but was untidy.
2504 23. Steven Van Ingelgem's patch to CMakeLists.txt to change the name
2505 CMAKE_BINARY_DIR to PROJECT_BINARY_DIR so that it works when PCRE is
2506 included within another project.
2508 24. Steven Van Ingelgem's patches to add more options to the CMake support,
2509 slightly modified by me:
2511 (a) PCRE_BUILD_TESTS can be set OFF not to build the tests, including
2512 not building pcregrep.
2514 (b) PCRE_BUILD_PCREGREP can be see OFF not to build pcregrep, but only
2515 if PCRE_BUILD_TESTS is also set OFF, because the tests use pcregrep.
2517 25. Forward references, both numeric and by name, in patterns that made use of
2518 duplicate group numbers, could behave incorrectly or give incorrect errors,
2519 because when scanning forward to find the reference group, PCRE was not
2520 taking into account the duplicate group numbers. A pattern such as
2521 ^X(?3)(a)(?|(b)|(q))(Y) is an example.
2523 26. Changed a few more instances of "const unsigned char *" to USPTR, making
2524 the feature of a custom pointer more persuasive (as requested by a user).
2526 27. Wrapped the definitions of fileno and isatty for Windows, which appear in
2527 pcretest.c, inside #ifndefs, because it seems they are sometimes already
2530 28. Added support for (*UTF8) at the start of a pattern.
2532 29. Arrange for flags added by the "release type" setting in CMake to be shown
2533 in the configuration summary.
2536 Version 7.8 05-Sep-08
2537 ---------------------
2539 1. Replaced UCP searching code with optimized version as implemented for Ad
2540 Muncher (http://www.admuncher.com/) by Peter Kankowski. This uses a two-
2541 stage table and inline lookup instead of a function, giving speed ups of 2
2542 to 5 times on some simple patterns that I tested. Permission was given to
2543 distribute the MultiStage2.py script that generates the tables (it's not in
2544 the tarball, but is in the Subversion repository).
2546 2. Updated the Unicode datatables to Unicode 5.1.0. This adds yet more
2549 3. Change 12 for 7.7 introduced a bug in pcre_study() when a pattern contained
2550 a group with a zero qualifier. The result of the study could be incorrect,
2551 or the function might crash, depending on the pattern.
2553 4. Caseless matching was not working for non-ASCII characters in back
2554 references. For example, /(\x{de})\1/8i was not matching \x{de}\x{fe}.
2555 It now works when Unicode Property Support is available.
2557 5. In pcretest, an escape such as \x{de} in the data was always generating
2558 a UTF-8 string, even in non-UTF-8 mode. Now it generates a single byte in
2559 non-UTF-8 mode. If the value is greater than 255, it gives a warning about
2562 6. Minor bugfix in pcrecpp.cc (change "" == ... to NULL == ...).
2564 7. Added two (int) casts to pcregrep when printing the difference of two
2565 pointers, in case they are 64-bit values.
2567 8. Added comments about Mac OS X stack usage to the pcrestack man page and to
2570 9. Added PCRE_CALL_CONVENTION just before the names of all exported functions,
2571 and a #define of that name to empty if it is not externally set. This is to
2572 allow users of MSVC to set it if necessary.
2574 10. The PCRE_EXP_DEFN macro which precedes exported functions was missing from
2575 the convenience functions in the pcre_get.c source file.
2577 11. An option change at the start of a pattern that had top-level alternatives
2578 could cause overwriting and/or a crash. This command provoked a crash in
2581 printf "/(?i)[\xc3\xa9\xc3\xbd]|[\xc3\xa9\xc3\xbdA]/8\n" | pcretest
2583 This potential security problem was recorded as CVE-2008-2371.
2585 12. For a pattern where the match had to start at the beginning or immediately
2586 after a newline (e.g /.*anything/ without the DOTALL flag), pcre_exec() and
2587 pcre_dfa_exec() could read past the end of the passed subject if there was
2588 no match. To help with detecting such bugs (e.g. with valgrind), I modified
2589 pcretest so that it places the subject at the end of its malloc-ed buffer.
2591 13. The change to pcretest in 12 above threw up a couple more cases when pcre_
2592 exec() might read past the end of the data buffer in UTF-8 mode.
2594 14. A similar bug to 7.3/2 existed when the PCRE_FIRSTLINE option was set and
2595 the data contained the byte 0x85 as part of a UTF-8 character within its
2596 first line. This applied both to normal and DFA matching.
2598 15. Lazy qualifiers were not working in some cases in UTF-8 mode. For example,
2599 /^[^d]*?$/8 failed to match "abc".
2601 16. Added a missing copyright notice to pcrecpp_internal.h.
2603 17. Make it more clear in the documentation that values returned from
2604 pcre_exec() in ovector are byte offsets, not character counts.
2606 18. Tidied a few places to stop certain compilers from issuing warnings.
2608 19. Updated the Virtual Pascal + BCC files to compile the latest v7.7, as
2609 supplied by Stefan Weber. I made a further small update for 7.8 because
2610 there is a change of source arrangements: the pcre_searchfuncs.c module is
2611 replaced by pcre_ucd.c.
2614 Version 7.7 07-May-08
2615 ---------------------
2617 1. Applied Craig's patch to sort out a long long problem: "If we can't convert
2618 a string to a long long, pretend we don't even have a long long." This is
2619 done by checking for the strtoq, strtoll, and _strtoi64 functions.
2621 2. Applied Craig's patch to pcrecpp.cc to restore ABI compatibility with
2622 pre-7.6 versions, which defined a global no_arg variable instead of putting
2623 it in the RE class. (See also #8 below.)
2625 3. Remove a line of dead code, identified by coverity and reported by Nuno
2628 4. Fixed two related pcregrep bugs involving -r with --include or --exclude:
2630 (1) The include/exclude patterns were being applied to the whole pathnames
2631 of files, instead of just to the final components.
2633 (2) If there was more than one level of directory, the subdirectories were
2634 skipped unless they satisfied the include/exclude conditions. This is
2635 inconsistent with GNU grep (and could even be seen as contrary to the
2636 pcregrep specification - which I improved to make it absolutely clear).
2637 The action now is always to scan all levels of directory, and just
2638 apply the include/exclude patterns to regular files.
2640 5. Added the --include_dir and --exclude_dir patterns to pcregrep, and used
2641 --exclude_dir in the tests to avoid scanning .svn directories.
2643 6. Applied Craig's patch to the QuoteMeta function so that it escapes the
2644 NUL character as backslash + 0 rather than backslash + NUL, because PCRE
2645 doesn't support NULs in patterns.
2647 7. Added some missing "const"s to declarations of static tables in
2648 pcre_compile.c and pcre_dfa_exec.c.
2650 8. Applied Craig's patch to pcrecpp.cc to fix a problem in OS X that was
2651 caused by fix #2 above. (Subsequently also a second patch to fix the
2652 first patch. And a third patch - this was a messy problem.)
2654 9. Applied Craig's patch to remove the use of push_back().
2656 10. Applied Alan Lehotsky's patch to add REG_STARTEND support to the POSIX
2657 matching function regexec().
2659 11. Added support for the Oniguruma syntax \g<name>, \g<n>, \g'name', \g'n',
2660 which, however, unlike Perl's \g{...}, are subroutine calls, not back
2661 references. PCRE supports relative numbers with this syntax (I don't think
2664 12. Previously, a group with a zero repeat such as (...){0} was completely
2665 omitted from the compiled regex. However, this means that if the group
2666 was called as a subroutine from elsewhere in the pattern, things went wrong
2667 (an internal error was given). Such groups are now left in the compiled
2668 pattern, with a new opcode that causes them to be skipped at execution
2671 13. Added the PCRE_JAVASCRIPT_COMPAT option. This makes the following changes
2672 to the way PCRE behaves:
2674 (a) A lone ] character is dis-allowed (Perl treats it as data).
2676 (b) A back reference to an unmatched subpattern matches an empty string
2677 (Perl fails the current match path).
2679 (c) A data ] in a character class must be notated as \] because if the
2680 first data character in a class is ], it defines an empty class. (In
2681 Perl it is not possible to have an empty class.) The empty class []
2682 never matches; it forces failure and is equivalent to (*FAIL) or (?!).
2683 The negative empty class [^] matches any one character, independently
2684 of the DOTALL setting.
2686 14. A pattern such as /(?2)[]a()b](abc)/ which had a forward reference to a
2687 non-existent subpattern following a character class starting with ']' and
2688 containing () gave an internal compiling error instead of "reference to
2689 non-existent subpattern". Fortunately, when the pattern did exist, the
2690 compiled code was correct. (When scanning forwards to check for the
2691 existence of the subpattern, it was treating the data ']' as terminating
2692 the class, so got the count wrong. When actually compiling, the reference
2693 was subsequently set up correctly.)
2695 15. The "always fail" assertion (?!) is optimzed to (*FAIL) by pcre_compile;
2696 it was being rejected as not supported by pcre_dfa_exec(), even though
2697 other assertions are supported. I have made pcre_dfa_exec() support
2700 16. The implementation of 13c above involved the invention of a new opcode,
2701 OP_ALLANY, which is like OP_ANY but doesn't check the /s flag. Since /s
2702 cannot be changed at match time, I realized I could make a small
2703 improvement to matching performance by compiling OP_ALLANY instead of
2704 OP_ANY for "." when DOTALL was set, and then removing the runtime tests
2707 17. Compiling pcretest on Windows with readline support failed without the
2708 following two fixes: (1) Make the unistd.h include conditional on
2709 HAVE_UNISTD_H; (2) #define isatty and fileno as _isatty and _fileno.
2711 18. Changed CMakeLists.txt and cmake/FindReadline.cmake to arrange for the
2712 ncurses library to be included for pcretest when ReadLine support is
2713 requested, but also to allow for it to be overridden. This patch came from
2716 19. There was a typo in the file ucpinternal.h where f0_rangeflag was defined
2717 as 0x00f00000 instead of 0x00800000. Luckily, this would not have caused
2718 any errors with the current Unicode tables. Thanks to Peter Kankowski for
2722 Version 7.6 28-Jan-08
2723 ---------------------
2725 1. A character class containing a very large number of characters with
2726 codepoints greater than 255 (in UTF-8 mode, of course) caused a buffer
2729 2. Patch to cut out the "long long" test in pcrecpp_unittest when
2730 HAVE_LONG_LONG is not defined.
2732 3. Applied Christian Ehrlicher's patch to update the CMake build files to
2733 bring them up to date and include new features. This patch includes:
2735 - Fixed PH's badly added libz and libbz2 support.
2736 - Fixed a problem with static linking.
2737 - Added pcredemo. [But later removed - see 7 below.]
2738 - Fixed dftables problem and added an option.
2739 - Added a number of HAVE_XXX tests, including HAVE_WINDOWS_H and
2741 - Added readline support for pcretest.
2742 - Added an listing of the option settings after cmake has run.
2744 4. A user submitted a patch to Makefile that makes it easy to create
2745 "pcre.dll" under mingw when using Configure/Make. I added stuff to
2746 Makefile.am that cause it to include this special target, without
2747 affecting anything else. Note that the same mingw target plus all
2748 the other distribution libraries and programs are now supported
2749 when configuring with CMake (see 6 below) instead of with
2752 5. Applied Craig's patch that moves no_arg into the RE class in the C++ code.
2753 This is an attempt to solve the reported problem "pcrecpp::no_arg is not
2754 exported in the Windows port". It has not yet been confirmed that the patch
2755 solves the problem, but it does no harm.
2757 6. Applied Sheri's patch to CMakeLists.txt to add NON_STANDARD_LIB_PREFIX and
2758 NON_STANDARD_LIB_SUFFIX for dll names built with mingw when configured
2759 with CMake, and also correct the comment about stack recursion.
2761 7. Remove the automatic building of pcredemo from the ./configure system and
2762 from CMakeLists.txt. The whole idea of pcredemo.c is that it is an example
2763 of a program that users should build themselves after PCRE is installed, so
2764 building it automatically is not really right. What is more, it gave
2765 trouble in some build environments.
2767 8. Further tidies to CMakeLists.txt from Sheri and Christian.
2770 Version 7.5 10-Jan-08
2771 ---------------------
2773 1. Applied a patch from Craig: "This patch makes it possible to 'ignore'
2774 values in parens when parsing an RE using the C++ wrapper."
2776 2. Negative specials like \S did not work in character classes in UTF-8 mode.
2777 Characters greater than 255 were excluded from the class instead of being
2780 3. The same bug as (2) above applied to negated POSIX classes such as
2783 4. PCRECPP_STATIC was referenced in pcrecpp_internal.h, but nowhere was it
2784 defined or documented. It seems to have been a typo for PCRE_STATIC, so
2787 5. The construct (?&) was not diagnosed as a syntax error (it referenced the
2788 first named subpattern) and a construct such as (?&a) would reference the
2789 first named subpattern whose name started with "a" (in other words, the
2790 length check was missing). Both these problems are fixed. "Subpattern name
2791 expected" is now given for (?&) (a zero-length name), and this patch also
2792 makes it give the same error for \k'' (previously it complained that that
2793 was a reference to a non-existent subpattern).
2795 6. The erroneous patterns (?+-a) and (?-+a) give different error messages;
2796 this is right because (?- can be followed by option settings as well as by
2797 digits. I have, however, made the messages clearer.
2799 7. Patterns such as (?(1)a|b) (a pattern that contains fewer subpatterns
2800 than the number used in the conditional) now cause a compile-time error.
2801 This is actually not compatible with Perl, which accepts such patterns, but
2802 treats the conditional as always being FALSE (as PCRE used to), but it
2803 seems to me that giving a diagnostic is better.
2805 8. Change "alphameric" to the more common word "alphanumeric" in comments
2808 9. Fix two occurrences of "backslash" in comments that should have been
2811 10. Remove two redundant lines of code that can never be obeyed (their function
2812 was moved elsewhere).
2814 11. The program that makes PCRE's Unicode character property table had a bug
2815 which caused it to generate incorrect table entries for sequences of
2816 characters that have the same character type, but are in different scripts.
2817 It amalgamated them into a single range, with the script of the first of
2818 them. In other words, some characters were in the wrong script. There were
2819 thirteen such cases, affecting characters in the following ranges:
2835 12. The -o option (show only the matching part of a line) for pcregrep was not
2836 compatible with GNU grep in that, if there was more than one match in a
2837 line, it showed only the first of them. It now behaves in the same way as
2840 13. If the -o and -v options were combined for pcregrep, it printed a blank
2841 line for every non-matching line. GNU grep prints nothing, and pcregrep now
2842 does the same. The return code can be used to tell if there were any
2845 14. Added --file-offsets and --line-offsets to pcregrep.
2847 15. The pattern (?=something)(?R) was not being diagnosed as a potentially
2848 infinitely looping recursion. The bug was that positive lookaheads were not
2849 being skipped when checking for a possible empty match (negative lookaheads
2850 and both kinds of lookbehind were skipped).
2852 16. Fixed two typos in the Windows-only code in pcregrep.c, and moved the
2853 inclusion of <windows.h> to before rather than after the definition of
2854 INVALID_FILE_ATTRIBUTES (patch from David Byron).
2856 17. Specifying a possessive quantifier with a specific limit for a Unicode
2857 character property caused pcre_compile() to compile bad code, which led at
2858 runtime to PCRE_ERROR_INTERNAL (-14). Examples of patterns that caused this
2859 are: /\p{Zl}{2,3}+/8 and /\p{Cc}{2}+/8. It was the possessive "+" that
2860 caused the error; without that there was no problem.
2862 18. Added --enable-pcregrep-libz and --enable-pcregrep-libbz2.
2864 19. Added --enable-pcretest-libreadline.
2866 20. In pcrecpp.cc, the variable 'count' was incremented twice in
2867 RE::GlobalReplace(). As a result, the number of replacements returned was
2868 double what it should be. I removed one of the increments, but Craig sent a
2869 later patch that removed the other one (the right fix) and added unit tests
2870 that check the return values (which was not done before).
2872 21. Several CMake things:
2874 (1) Arranged that, when cmake is used on Unix, the libraries end up with
2875 the names libpcre and libpcreposix, not just pcre and pcreposix.
2877 (2) The above change means that pcretest and pcregrep are now correctly
2878 linked with the newly-built libraries, not previously installed ones.
2880 (3) Added PCRE_SUPPORT_LIBREADLINE, PCRE_SUPPORT_LIBZ, PCRE_SUPPORT_LIBBZ2.
2882 22. In UTF-8 mode, with newline set to "any", a pattern such as .*a.*=.b.*
2883 crashed when matching a string such as a\x{2029}b (note that \x{2029} is a
2884 UTF-8 newline character). The key issue is that the pattern starts .*;
2885 this means that the match must be either at the beginning, or after a
2886 newline. The bug was in the code for advancing after a failed match and
2887 checking that the new position followed a newline. It was not taking
2888 account of UTF-8 characters correctly.
2890 23. PCRE was behaving differently from Perl in the way it recognized POSIX
2891 character classes. PCRE was not treating the sequence [:...:] as a
2892 character class unless the ... were all letters. Perl, however, seems to
2893 allow any characters between [: and :], though of course it rejects as
2894 unknown any "names" that contain non-letters, because all the known class
2895 names consist only of letters. Thus, Perl gives an error for [[:1234:]],
2896 for example, whereas PCRE did not - it did not recognize a POSIX character
2897 class. This seemed a bit dangerous, so the code has been changed to be
2898 closer to Perl. The behaviour is not identical to Perl, because PCRE will
2899 diagnose an unknown class for, for example, [[:l\ower:]] where Perl will
2900 treat it as [[:lower:]]. However, PCRE does now give "unknown" errors where
2901 Perl does, and where it didn't before.
2903 24. Rewrite so as to remove the single use of %n from pcregrep because in some
2904 Windows environments %n is disabled by default.
2907 Version 7.4 21-Sep-07
2908 ---------------------
2910 1. Change 7.3/28 was implemented for classes by looking at the bitmap. This
2911 means that a class such as [\s] counted as "explicit reference to CR or
2912 LF". That isn't really right - the whole point of the change was to try to
2913 help when there was an actual mention of one of the two characters. So now
2914 the change happens only if \r or \n (or a literal CR or LF) character is
2917 2. The 32-bit options word was also used for 6 internal flags, but the numbers
2918 of both had grown to the point where there were only 3 bits left.
2919 Fortunately, there was spare space in the data structure, and so I have
2920 moved the internal flags into a new 16-bit field to free up more option
2923 3. The appearance of (?J) at the start of a pattern set the DUPNAMES option,
2924 but did not set the internal JCHANGED flag - either of these is enough to
2925 control the way the "get" function works - but the PCRE_INFO_JCHANGED
2926 facility is supposed to tell if (?J) was ever used, so now (?J) at the
2927 start sets both bits.
2929 4. Added options (at build time, compile time, exec time) to change \R from
2930 matching any Unicode line ending sequence to just matching CR, LF, or CRLF.
2932 5. doc/pcresyntax.html was missing from the distribution.
2934 6. Put back the definition of PCRE_ERROR_NULLWSLIMIT, for backward
2935 compatibility, even though it is no longer used.
2937 7. Added macro for snprintf to pcrecpp_unittest.cc and also for strtoll and
2938 strtoull to pcrecpp.cc to select the available functions in WIN32 when the
2939 windows.h file is present (where different names are used). [This was
2940 reversed later after testing - see 16 below.]
2942 8. Changed all #include <config.h> to #include "config.h". There were also
2943 some further <pcre.h> cases that I changed to "pcre.h".
2945 9. When pcregrep was used with the --colour option, it missed the line ending
2946 sequence off the lines that it output.
2948 10. It was pointed out to me that arrays of string pointers cause lots of
2949 relocations when a shared library is dynamically loaded. A technique of
2950 using a single long string with a table of offsets can drastically reduce
2951 these. I have refactored PCRE in four places to do this. The result is
2955 After changing UCP table: 187
2956 After changing error message table: 43
2957 After changing table of "verbs" 36
2958 After changing table of Posix names 22
2960 Thanks to the folks working on Gregex for glib for this insight.
2962 11. --disable-stack-for-recursion caused compiling to fail unless -enable-
2963 unicode-properties was also set.
2965 12. Updated the tests so that they work when \R is defaulted to ANYCRLF.
2967 13. Added checks for ANY and ANYCRLF to pcrecpp.cc where it previously
2968 checked only for CRLF.
2970 14. Added casts to pcretest.c to avoid compiler warnings.
2972 15. Added Craig's patch to various pcrecpp modules to avoid compiler warnings.
2974 16. Added Craig's patch to remove the WINDOWS_H tests, that were not working,
2975 and instead check for _strtoi64 explicitly, and avoid the use of snprintf()
2976 entirely. This removes changes made in 7 above.
2978 17. The CMake files have been updated, and there is now more information about
2979 building with CMake in the NON-UNIX-USE document.
2982 Version 7.3 28-Aug-07
2983 ---------------------
2985 1. In the rejigging of the build system that eventually resulted in 7.1, the
2986 line "#include <pcre.h>" was included in pcre_internal.h. The use of angle
2987 brackets there is not right, since it causes compilers to look for an
2988 installed pcre.h, not the version that is in the source that is being
2989 compiled (which of course may be different). I have changed it back to:
2993 I have a vague recollection that the change was concerned with compiling in
2994 different directories, but in the new build system, that is taken care of
2995 by the VPATH setting the Makefile.
2997 2. The pattern .*$ when run in not-DOTALL UTF-8 mode with newline=any failed
2998 when the subject happened to end in the byte 0x85 (e.g. if the last
2999 character was \x{1ec5}). *Character* 0x85 is one of the "any" newline
3000 characters but of course it shouldn't be taken as a newline when it is part
3001 of another character. The bug was that, for an unlimited repeat of . in
3002 not-DOTALL UTF-8 mode, PCRE was advancing by bytes rather than by
3003 characters when looking for a newline.
3005 3. A small performance improvement in the DOTALL UTF-8 mode .* case.
3007 4. Debugging: adjusted the names of opcodes for different kinds of parentheses
3010 5. Arrange to use "%I64d" instead of "%lld" and "%I64u" instead of "%llu" for
3011 long printing in the pcrecpp unittest when running under MinGW.
3013 6. ESC_K was left out of the EBCDIC table.
3015 7. Change 7.0/38 introduced a new limit on the number of nested non-capturing
3016 parentheses; I made it 1000, which seemed large enough. Unfortunately, the
3017 limit also applies to "virtual nesting" when a pattern is recursive, and in
3018 this case 1000 isn't so big. I have been able to remove this limit at the
3019 expense of backing off one optimization in certain circumstances. Normally,
3020 when pcre_exec() would call its internal match() function recursively and
3021 immediately return the result unconditionally, it uses a "tail recursion"
3022 feature to save stack. However, when a subpattern that can match an empty
3023 string has an unlimited repetition quantifier, it no longer makes this
3024 optimization. That gives it a stack frame in which to save the data for
3025 checking that an empty string has been matched. Previously this was taken
3026 from the 1000-entry workspace that had been reserved. So now there is no
3027 explicit limit, but more stack is used.
3029 8. Applied Daniel's patches to solve problems with the import/export magic
3030 syntax that is required for Windows, and which was going wrong for the
3031 pcreposix and pcrecpp parts of the library. These were overlooked when this
3032 problem was solved for the main library.
3034 9. There were some crude static tests to avoid integer overflow when computing
3035 the size of patterns that contain repeated groups with explicit upper
3036 limits. As the maximum quantifier is 65535, the maximum group length was
3037 set at 30,000 so that the product of these two numbers did not overflow a
3038 32-bit integer. However, it turns out that people want to use groups that
3039 are longer than 30,000 bytes (though not repeat them that many times).
3040 Change 7.0/17 (the refactoring of the way the pattern size is computed) has
3041 made it possible to implement the integer overflow checks in a much more
3042 dynamic way, which I have now done. The artificial limitation on group
3043 length has been removed - we now have only the limit on the total length of
3044 the compiled pattern, which depends on the LINK_SIZE setting.
3046 10. Fixed a bug in the documentation for get/copy named substring when
3047 duplicate names are permitted. If none of the named substrings are set, the
3048 functions return PCRE_ERROR_NOSUBSTRING (7); the doc said they returned an
3051 11. Because Perl interprets \Q...\E at a high level, and ignores orphan \E
3052 instances, patterns such as [\Q\E] or [\E] or even [^\E] cause an error,
3053 because the ] is interpreted as the first data character and the
3054 terminating ] is not found. PCRE has been made compatible with Perl in this
3055 regard. Previously, it interpreted [\Q\E] as an empty class, and [\E] could
3056 cause memory overwriting.
3058 10. Like Perl, PCRE automatically breaks an unlimited repeat after an empty
3059 string has been matched (to stop an infinite loop). It was not recognizing
3060 a conditional subpattern that could match an empty string if that
3061 subpattern was within another subpattern. For example, it looped when
3062 trying to match (((?(1)X|))*) but it was OK with ((?(1)X|)*) where the
3063 condition was not nested. This bug has been fixed.
3065 12. A pattern like \X?\d or \P{L}?\d in non-UTF-8 mode could cause a backtrack
3066 past the start of the subject in the presence of bytes with the top bit
3067 set, for example "\x8aBCD".
3069 13. Added Perl 5.10 experimental backtracking controls (*FAIL), (*F), (*PRUNE),
3070 (*SKIP), (*THEN), (*COMMIT), and (*ACCEPT).
3072 14. Optimized (?!) to (*FAIL).
3074 15. Updated the test for a valid UTF-8 string to conform to the later RFC 3629.
3075 This restricts code points to be within the range 0 to 0x10FFFF, excluding
3076 the "low surrogate" sequence 0xD800 to 0xDFFF. Previously, PCRE allowed the
3077 full range 0 to 0x7FFFFFFF, as defined by RFC 2279. Internally, it still
3078 does: it's just the validity check that is more restrictive.
3080 16. Inserted checks for integer overflows during escape sequence (backslash)
3081 processing, and also fixed erroneous offset values for syntax errors during
3082 backslash processing.
3084 17. Fixed another case of looking too far back in non-UTF-8 mode (cf 12 above)
3085 for patterns like [\PPP\x8a]{1,}\x80 with the subject "A\x80".
3087 18. An unterminated class in a pattern like (?1)\c[ with a "forward reference"
3090 19. A pattern like (?:[\PPa*]*){8,} which had an "extended class" (one with
3091 something other than just ASCII characters) inside a group that had an
3092 unlimited repeat caused a loop at compile time (while checking to see
3093 whether the group could match an empty string).
3095 20. Debugging a pattern containing \p or \P could cause a crash. For example,
3096 [\P{Any}] did so. (Error in the code for printing property names.)
3098 21. An orphan \E inside a character class could cause a crash.
3100 22. A repeated capturing bracket such as (A)? could cause a wild memory
3101 reference during compilation.
3103 23. There are several functions in pcre_compile() that scan along a compiled
3104 expression for various reasons (e.g. to see if it's fixed length for look
3105 behind). There were bugs in these functions when a repeated \p or \P was
3106 present in the pattern. These operators have additional parameters compared
3107 with \d, etc, and these were not being taken into account when moving along
3108 the compiled data. Specifically:
3110 (a) A item such as \p{Yi}{3} in a lookbehind was not treated as fixed
3113 (b) An item such as \pL+ within a repeated group could cause crashes or
3116 (c) A pattern such as \p{Yi}+(\P{Yi}+)(?1) could give an incorrect
3117 "reference to non-existent subpattern" error.
3119 (d) A pattern like (\P{Yi}{2}\277)? could loop at compile time.
3121 24. A repeated \S or \W in UTF-8 mode could give wrong answers when multibyte
3122 characters were involved (for example /\S{2}/8g with "A\x{a3}BC").
3124 25. Using pcregrep in multiline, inverted mode (-Mv) caused it to loop.
3126 26. Patterns such as [\P{Yi}A] which include \p or \P and just one other
3127 character were causing crashes (broken optimization).
3129 27. Patterns such as (\P{Yi}*\277)* (group with possible zero repeat containing
3130 \p or \P) caused a compile-time loop.
3132 28. More problems have arisen in unanchored patterns when CRLF is a valid line
3133 break. For example, the unstudied pattern [\r\n]A does not match the string
3134 "\r\nA" because change 7.0/46 below moves the current point on by two
3135 characters after failing to match at the start. However, the pattern \nA
3136 *does* match, because it doesn't start till \n, and if [\r\n]A is studied,
3137 the same is true. There doesn't seem any very clean way out of this, but
3138 what I have chosen to do makes the common cases work: PCRE now takes note
3139 of whether there can be an explicit match for \r or \n anywhere in the
3140 pattern, and if so, 7.0/46 no longer applies. As part of this change,
3141 there's a new PCRE_INFO_HASCRORLF option for finding out whether a compiled
3142 pattern has explicit CR or LF references.
3144 29. Added (*CR) etc for changing newline setting at start of pattern.
3147 Version 7.2 19-Jun-07
3148 ---------------------
3150 1. If the fr_FR locale cannot be found for test 3, try the "french" locale,
3151 which is apparently normally available under Windows.
3153 2. Re-jig the pcregrep tests with different newline settings in an attempt
3154 to make them independent of the local environment's newline setting.
3156 3. Add code to configure.ac to remove -g from the CFLAGS default settings.
3158 4. Some of the "internals" tests were previously cut out when the link size
3159 was not 2, because the output contained actual offsets. The recent new
3160 "Z" feature of pcretest means that these can be cut out, making the tests
3161 usable with all link sizes.
3163 5. Implemented Stan Switzer's goto replacement for longjmp() when not using
3164 stack recursion. This gives a massive performance boost under BSD, but just
3165 a small improvement under Linux. However, it saves one field in the frame
3168 6. Added more features from the forthcoming Perl 5.10:
3170 (a) (?-n) (where n is a string of digits) is a relative subroutine or
3171 recursion call. It refers to the nth most recently opened parentheses.
3173 (b) (?+n) is also a relative subroutine call; it refers to the nth next
3174 to be opened parentheses.
3176 (c) Conditions that refer to capturing parentheses can be specified
3177 relatively, for example, (?(-2)... or (?(+3)...
3179 (d) \K resets the start of the current match so that everything before
3182 (e) \k{name} is synonymous with \k<name> and \k'name' (.NET compatible).
3184 (f) \g{name} is another synonym - part of Perl 5.10's unification of
3187 (g) (?| introduces a group in which the numbering of parentheses in each
3188 alternative starts with the same number.
3190 (h) \h, \H, \v, and \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace.
3192 7. Added two new calls to pcre_fullinfo(): PCRE_INFO_OKPARTIAL and
3195 8. A pattern such as (.*(.)?)* caused pcre_exec() to fail by either not
3196 terminating or by crashing. Diagnosed by Viktor Griph; it was in the code
3197 for detecting groups that can match an empty string.
3199 9. A pattern with a very large number of alternatives (more than several
3200 hundred) was running out of internal workspace during the pre-compile
3201 phase, where pcre_compile() figures out how much memory will be needed. A
3202 bit of new cunning has reduced the workspace needed for groups with
3203 alternatives. The 1000-alternative test pattern now uses 12 bytes of
3204 workspace instead of running out of the 4096 that are available.
3206 10. Inserted some missing (unsigned int) casts to get rid of compiler warnings.
3208 11. Applied patch from Google to remove an optimization that didn't quite work.
3209 The report of the bug said:
3211 pcrecpp::RE("a*").FullMatch("aaa") matches, while
3212 pcrecpp::RE("a*?").FullMatch("aaa") does not, and
3213 pcrecpp::RE("a*?\\z").FullMatch("aaa") does again.
3215 12. If \p or \P was used in non-UTF-8 mode on a character greater than 127
3216 it matched the wrong number of bytes.
3219 Version 7.1 24-Apr-07
3220 ---------------------
3222 1. Applied Bob Rossi and Daniel G's patches to convert the build system to one
3223 that is more "standard", making use of automake and other Autotools. There
3224 is some re-arrangement of the files and adjustment of comments consequent
3227 2. Part of the patch fixed a problem with the pcregrep tests. The test of -r
3228 for recursive directory scanning broke on some systems because the files
3229 are not scanned in any specific order and on different systems the order
3230 was different. A call to "sort" has been inserted into RunGrepTest for the
3231 approprate test as a short-term fix. In the longer term there may be an
3234 3. I had an email from Eric Raymond about problems translating some of PCRE's
3235 man pages to HTML (despite the fact that I distribute HTML pages, some
3236 people do their own conversions for various reasons). The problems
3237 concerned the use of low-level troff macros .br and .in. I have therefore
3238 removed all such uses from the man pages (some were redundant, some could
3239 be replaced by .nf/.fi pairs). The 132html script that I use to generate
3240 HTML has been updated to handle .nf/.fi and to complain if it encounters
3243 4. Updated comments in configure.ac that get placed in config.h.in and also
3244 arranged for config.h to be included in the distribution, with the name
3245 config.h.generic, for the benefit of those who have to compile without
3246 Autotools (compare pcre.h, which is now distributed as pcre.h.generic).
3248 5. Updated the support (such as it is) for Virtual Pascal, thanks to Stefan
3249 Weber: (1) pcre_internal.h was missing some function renames; (2) updated
3250 makevp.bat for the current PCRE, using the additional files
3251 makevp_c.txt, makevp_l.txt, and pcregexp.pas.
3253 6. A Windows user reported a minor discrepancy with test 2, which turned out
3254 to be caused by a trailing space on an input line that had got lost in his
3255 copy. The trailing space was an accident, so I've just removed it.
3257 7. Add -Wl,-R... flags in pcre-config.in for *BSD* systems, as I'm told
3260 8. Mark ucp_table (in ucptable.h) and ucp_gentype (in pcre_ucp_searchfuncs.c)
3261 as "const" (a) because they are and (b) because it helps the PHP
3262 maintainers who have recently made a script to detect big data structures
3263 in the php code that should be moved to the .rodata section. I remembered
3264 to update Builducptable as well, so it won't revert if ucptable.h is ever
3267 9. Added some extra #ifdef SUPPORT_UTF8 conditionals into pcretest.c,
3268 pcre_printint.src, pcre_compile.c, pcre_study.c, and pcre_tables.c, in
3269 order to be able to cut out the UTF-8 tables in the latter when UTF-8
3270 support is not required. This saves 1.5-2K of code, which is important in
3273 Later: more #ifdefs are needed in pcre_ord2utf8.c and pcre_valid_utf8.c
3274 so as not to refer to the tables, even though these functions will never be
3275 called when UTF-8 support is disabled. Otherwise there are problems with a
3278 10. Fixed two bugs in the emulated memmove() function in pcre_internal.h:
3280 (a) It was defining its arguments as char * instead of void *.
3282 (b) It was assuming that all moves were upwards in memory; this was true
3283 a long time ago when I wrote it, but is no longer the case.
3285 The emulated memove() is provided for those environments that have neither
3286 memmove() nor bcopy(). I didn't think anyone used it these days, but that
3287 is clearly not the case, as these two bugs were recently reported.
3289 11. The script PrepareRelease is now distributed: it calls 132html, CleanTxt,
3290 and Detrail to create the HTML documentation, the .txt form of the man
3291 pages, and it removes trailing spaces from listed files. It also creates
3292 pcre.h.generic and config.h.generic from pcre.h and config.h. In the latter
3293 case, it wraps all the #defines with #ifndefs. This script should be run
3296 12. Fixed two fairly obscure bugs concerned with quantified caseless matching
3297 with Unicode property support.
3299 (a) For a maximizing quantifier, if the two different cases of the
3300 character were of different lengths in their UTF-8 codings (there are
3301 some cases like this - I found 11), and the matching function had to
3302 back up over a mixture of the two cases, it incorrectly assumed they
3303 were both the same length.
3305 (b) When PCRE was configured to use the heap rather than the stack for
3306 recursion during matching, it was not correctly preserving the data for
3307 the other case of a UTF-8 character when checking ahead for a match
3308 while processing a minimizing repeat. If the check also involved
3309 matching a wide character, but failed, corruption could cause an
3310 erroneous result when trying to check for a repeat of the original
3313 13. Some tidying changes to the testing mechanism:
3315 (a) The RunTest script now detects the internal link size and whether there
3316 is UTF-8 and UCP support by running ./pcretest -C instead of relying on
3317 values substituted by "configure". (The RunGrepTest script already did
3318 this for UTF-8.) The configure.ac script no longer substitutes the
3321 (b) The debugging options /B and /D in pcretest show the compiled bytecode
3322 with length and offset values. This means that the output is different
3323 for different internal link sizes. Test 2 is skipped for link sizes
3324 other than 2 because of this, bypassing the problem. Unfortunately,
3325 there was also a test in test 3 (the locale tests) that used /B and
3326 failed for link sizes other than 2. Rather than cut the whole test out,
3327 I have added a new /Z option to pcretest that replaces the length and
3328 offset values with spaces. This is now used to make test 3 independent
3329 of link size. (Test 2 will be tidied up later.)
3331 14. If erroroffset was passed as NULL to pcre_compile, it provoked a
3332 segmentation fault instead of returning the appropriate error message.
3334 15. In multiline mode when the newline sequence was set to "any", the pattern
3335 ^$ would give a match between the \r and \n of a subject such as "A\r\nB".
3336 This doesn't seem right; it now treats the CRLF combination as the line
3337 ending, and so does not match in that case. It's only a pattern such as ^$
3338 that would hit this one: something like ^ABC$ would have failed after \r
3339 and then tried again after \r\n.
3341 16. Changed the comparison command for RunGrepTest from "diff -u" to "diff -ub"
3342 in an attempt to make files that differ only in their line terminators
3343 compare equal. This works on Linux.
3345 17. Under certain error circumstances pcregrep might try to free random memory
3346 as it exited. This is now fixed, thanks to valgrind.
3348 19. In pcretest, if the pattern /(?m)^$/g<any> was matched against the string
3349 "abc\r\n\r\n", it found an unwanted second match after the second \r. This
3350 was because its rules for how to advance for /g after matching an empty
3351 string at the end of a line did not allow for this case. They now check for
3354 20. pcretest is supposed to handle patterns and data of any length, by
3355 extending its buffers when necessary. It was getting this wrong when the
3356 buffer for a data line had to be extended.
3358 21. Added PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF which is like ANY, but matches only CR, LF, or
3359 CRLF as a newline sequence.
3361 22. Code for handling Unicode properties in pcre_dfa_exec() wasn't being cut
3362 out by #ifdef SUPPORT_UCP. This did no harm, as it could never be used, but
3363 I have nevertheless tidied it up.
3365 23. Added some casts to kill warnings from HP-UX ia64 compiler.
3367 24. Added a man page for pcre-config.
3370 Version 7.0 19-Dec-06
3371 ---------------------
3373 1. Fixed a signed/unsigned compiler warning in pcre_compile.c, shown up by
3374 moving to gcc 4.1.1.
3376 2. The -S option for pcretest uses setrlimit(); I had omitted to #include
3377 sys/time.h, which is documented as needed for this function. It doesn't
3378 seem to matter on Linux, but it showed up on some releases of OS X.
3380 3. It seems that there are systems where bytes whose values are greater than
3381 127 match isprint() in the "C" locale. The "C" locale should be the
3382 default when a C program starts up. In most systems, only ASCII printing
3383 characters match isprint(). This difference caused the output from pcretest
3384 to vary, making some of the tests fail. I have changed pcretest so that:
3386 (a) When it is outputting text in the compiled version of a pattern, bytes
3387 other than 32-126 are always shown as hex escapes.
3389 (b) When it is outputting text that is a matched part of a subject string,
3390 it does the same, unless a different locale has been set for the match
3391 (using the /L modifier). In this case, it uses isprint() to decide.
3393 4. Fixed a major bug that caused incorrect computation of the amount of memory
3394 required for a compiled pattern when options that changed within the
3395 pattern affected the logic of the preliminary scan that determines the
3396 length. The relevant options are -x, and -i in UTF-8 mode. The result was
3397 that the computed length was too small. The symptoms of this bug were
3398 either the PCRE error "internal error: code overflow" from pcre_compile(),
3399 or a glibc crash with a message such as "pcretest: free(): invalid next
3400 size (fast)". Examples of patterns that provoked this bug (shown in
3401 pcretest format) are:
3404 /(?x)(?-x: \s*#\s*)/
3408 HOWEVER: Change 17 below makes this fix obsolete as the memory computation
3409 is now done differently.
3411 5. Applied patches from Google to: (a) add a QuoteMeta function to the C++
3412 wrapper classes; (b) implement a new function in the C++ scanner that is
3413 more efficient than the old way of doing things because it avoids levels of
3414 recursion in the regex matching; (c) add a paragraph to the documentation
3415 for the FullMatch() function.
3417 6. The escape sequence \n was being treated as whatever was defined as
3418 "newline". Not only was this contrary to the documentation, which states
3419 that \n is character 10 (hex 0A), but it also went horribly wrong when
3420 "newline" was defined as CRLF. This has been fixed.
3422 7. In pcre_dfa_exec.c the value of an unsigned integer (the variable called c)
3423 was being set to -1 for the "end of line" case (supposedly a value that no
3424 character can have). Though this value is never used (the check for end of
3425 line is "zero bytes in current character"), it caused compiler complaints.
3426 I've changed it to 0xffffffff.
3428 8. In pcre_version.c, the version string was being built by a sequence of
3429 C macros that, in the event of PCRE_PRERELEASE being defined as an empty
3430 string (as it is for production releases) called a macro with an empty
3431 argument. The C standard says the result of this is undefined. The gcc
3432 compiler treats it as an empty string (which was what was wanted) but it is
3433 reported that Visual C gives an error. The source has been hacked around to
3436 9. On the advice of a Windows user, included <io.h> and <fcntl.h> in Windows
3437 builds of pcretest, and changed the call to _setmode() to use _O_BINARY
3438 instead of 0x8000. Made all the #ifdefs test both _WIN32 and WIN32 (not all
3441 10. Originally, pcretest opened its input and output without "b"; then I was
3442 told that "b" was needed in some environments, so it was added for release
3443 5.0 to both the input and output. (It makes no difference on Unix-like
3444 systems.) Later I was told that it is wrong for the input on Windows. I've
3445 now abstracted the modes into two macros, to make it easier to fiddle with
3446 them, and removed "b" from the input mode under Windows.
3448 11. Added pkgconfig support for the C++ wrapper library, libpcrecpp.
3450 12. Added -help and --help to pcretest as an official way of being reminded
3453 13. Removed some redundant semicolons after macro calls in pcrecpparg.h.in
3454 and pcrecpp.cc because they annoy compilers at high warning levels.
3456 14. A bit of tidying/refactoring in pcre_exec.c in the main bumpalong loop.
3458 15. Fixed an occurrence of == in configure.ac that should have been = (shell
3459 scripts are not C programs :-) and which was not noticed because it works
3462 16. pcretest is supposed to handle any length of pattern and data line (as one
3463 line or as a continued sequence of lines) by extending its input buffer if
3464 necessary. This feature was broken for very long pattern lines, leading to
3465 a string of junk being passed to pcre_compile() if the pattern was longer
3468 17. I have done a major re-factoring of the way pcre_compile() computes the
3469 amount of memory needed for a compiled pattern. Previously, there was code
3470 that made a preliminary scan of the pattern in order to do this. That was
3471 OK when PCRE was new, but as the facilities have expanded, it has become
3472 harder and harder to keep it in step with the real compile phase, and there
3473 have been a number of bugs (see for example, 4 above). I have now found a
3474 cunning way of running the real compile function in a "fake" mode that
3475 enables it to compute how much memory it would need, while actually only
3476 ever using a few hundred bytes of working memory and without too many
3477 tests of the mode. This should make future maintenance and development
3478 easier. A side effect of this work is that the limit of 200 on the nesting
3479 depth of parentheses has been removed (though this was never a serious
3480 limitation, I suspect). However, there is a downside: pcre_compile() now
3481 runs more slowly than before (30% or more, depending on the pattern). I
3482 hope this isn't a big issue. There is no effect on runtime performance.
3484 18. Fixed a minor bug in pcretest: if a pattern line was not terminated by a
3485 newline (only possible for the last line of a file) and it was a
3486 pattern that set a locale (followed by /Lsomething), pcretest crashed.
3488 19. Added additional timing features to pcretest. (1) The -tm option now times
3489 matching only, not compiling. (2) Both -t and -tm can be followed, as a
3490 separate command line item, by a number that specifies the number of
3491 repeats to use when timing. The default is 50000; this gives better
3492 precision, but takes uncomfortably long for very large patterns.
3494 20. Extended pcre_study() to be more clever in cases where a branch of a
3495 subpattern has no definite first character. For example, (a*|b*)[cd] would
3496 previously give no result from pcre_study(). Now it recognizes that the
3497 first character must be a, b, c, or d.
3499 21. There was an incorrect error "recursive call could loop indefinitely" if
3500 a subpattern (or the entire pattern) that was being tested for matching an
3501 empty string contained only one non-empty item after a nested subpattern.
3502 For example, the pattern (?>\x{100}*)\d(?R) provoked this error
3503 incorrectly, because the \d was being skipped in the check.
3505 22. The pcretest program now has a new pattern option /B and a command line
3506 option -b, which is equivalent to adding /B to every pattern. This causes
3507 it to show the compiled bytecode, without the additional information that
3508 -d shows. The effect of -d is now the same as -b with -i (and similarly, /D
3509 is the same as /B/I).
3511 23. A new optimization is now able automatically to treat some sequences such
3512 as a*b as a*+b. More specifically, if something simple (such as a character
3513 or a simple class like \d) has an unlimited quantifier, and is followed by
3514 something that cannot possibly match the quantified thing, the quantifier
3515 is automatically "possessified".
3517 24. A recursive reference to a subpattern whose number was greater than 39
3518 went wrong under certain circumstances in UTF-8 mode. This bug could also
3519 have affected the operation of pcre_study().
3521 25. Realized that a little bit of performance could be had by replacing
3522 (c & 0xc0) == 0xc0 with c >= 0xc0 when processing UTF-8 characters.
3524 26. Timing data from pcretest is now shown to 4 decimal places instead of 3.
3526 27. Possessive quantifiers such as a++ were previously implemented by turning
3527 them into atomic groups such as ($>a+). Now they have their own opcodes,
3528 which improves performance. This includes the automatically created ones
3531 28. A pattern such as (?=(\w+))\1: which simulates an atomic group using a
3532 lookahead was broken if it was not anchored. PCRE was mistakenly expecting
3533 the first matched character to be a colon. This applied both to named and
3536 29. The ucpinternal.h header file was missing its idempotency #ifdef.
3538 30. I was sent a "project" file called libpcre.a.dev which I understand makes
3539 building PCRE on Windows easier, so I have included it in the distribution.
3541 31. There is now a check in pcretest against a ridiculously large number being
3542 returned by pcre_exec() or pcre_dfa_exec(). If this happens in a /g or /G
3543 loop, the loop is abandoned.
3545 32. Forward references to subpatterns in conditions such as (?(2)...) where
3546 subpattern 2 is defined later cause pcre_compile() to search forwards in
3547 the pattern for the relevant set of parentheses. This search went wrong
3548 when there were unescaped parentheses in a character class, parentheses
3549 escaped with \Q...\E, or parentheses in a #-comment in /x mode.
3551 33. "Subroutine" calls and backreferences were previously restricted to
3552 referencing subpatterns earlier in the regex. This restriction has now
3555 34. Added a number of extra features that are going to be in Perl 5.10. On the
3556 whole, these are just syntactic alternatives for features that PCRE had
3557 previously implemented using the Python syntax or my own invention. The
3558 other formats are all retained for compatibility.
3560 (a) Named groups can now be defined as (?<name>...) or (?'name'...) as well
3561 as (?P<name>...). The new forms, as well as being in Perl 5.10, are
3562 also .NET compatible.
3564 (b) A recursion or subroutine call to a named group can now be defined as
3565 (?&name) as well as (?P>name).
3567 (c) A backreference to a named group can now be defined as \k<name> or
3568 \k'name' as well as (?P=name). The new forms, as well as being in Perl
3569 5.10, are also .NET compatible.
3571 (d) A conditional reference to a named group can now use the syntax
3572 (?(<name>) or (?('name') as well as (?(name).
3574 (e) A "conditional group" of the form (?(DEFINE)...) can be used to define
3575 groups (named and numbered) that are never evaluated inline, but can be
3576 called as "subroutines" from elsewhere. In effect, the DEFINE condition
3577 is always false. There may be only one alternative in such a group.
3579 (f) A test for recursion can be given as (?(R1).. or (?(R&name)... as well
3580 as the simple (?(R). The condition is true only if the most recent
3581 recursion is that of the given number or name. It does not search out
3582 through the entire recursion stack.
3584 (g) The escape \gN or \g{N} has been added, where N is a positive or
3585 negative number, specifying an absolute or relative reference.
3587 35. Tidied to get rid of some further signed/unsigned compiler warnings and
3588 some "unreachable code" warnings.
3590 36. Updated the Unicode property tables to Unicode version 5.0.0. Amongst other
3591 things, this adds five new scripts.
3593 37. Perl ignores orphaned \E escapes completely. PCRE now does the same.
3594 There were also incompatibilities regarding the handling of \Q..\E inside
3595 character classes, for example with patterns like [\Qa\E-\Qz\E] where the
3596 hyphen was adjacent to \Q or \E. I hope I've cleared all this up now.
3598 38. Like Perl, PCRE detects when an indefinitely repeated parenthesized group
3599 matches an empty string, and forcibly breaks the loop. There were bugs in
3600 this code in non-simple cases. For a pattern such as ^(a()*)* matched
3601 against aaaa the result was just "a" rather than "aaaa", for example. Two
3602 separate and independent bugs (that affected different cases) have been
3605 39. Refactored the code to abolish the use of different opcodes for small
3606 capturing bracket numbers. This is a tidy that I avoided doing when I
3607 removed the limit on the number of capturing brackets for 3.5 back in 2001.
3608 The new approach is not only tidier, it makes it possible to reduce the
3609 memory needed to fix the previous bug (38).
3611 40. Implemented PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY to recognize any of the Unicode newline
3612 sequences (http://unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr18/) as "newline" when
3613 processing dot, circumflex, or dollar metacharacters, or #-comments in /x
3616 41. Add \R to match any Unicode newline sequence, as suggested in the Unicode
3619 42. Applied patch, originally from Ari Pollak, modified by Google, to allow
3620 copy construction and assignment in the C++ wrapper.
3622 43. Updated pcregrep to support "--newline=any". In the process, I fixed a
3623 couple of bugs that could have given wrong results in the "--newline=crlf"
3626 44. Added a number of casts and did some reorganization of signed/unsigned int
3627 variables following suggestions from Dair Grant. Also renamed the variable
3628 "this" as "item" because it is a C++ keyword.
3630 45. Arranged for dftables to add
3632 #include "pcre_internal.h"
3634 to pcre_chartables.c because without it, gcc 4.x may remove the array
3635 definition from the final binary if PCRE is built into a static library and
3636 dead code stripping is activated.
3638 46. For an unanchored pattern, if a match attempt fails at the start of a
3639 newline sequence, and the newline setting is CRLF or ANY, and the next two
3640 characters are CRLF, advance by two characters instead of one.
3643 Version 6.7 04-Jul-06
3644 ---------------------
3646 1. In order to handle tests when input lines are enormously long, pcretest has
3647 been re-factored so that it automatically extends its buffers when
3648 necessary. The code is crude, but this _is_ just a test program. The
3649 default size has been increased from 32K to 50K.
3651 2. The code in pcre_study() was using the value of the re argument before
3652 testing it for NULL. (Of course, in any sensible call of the function, it
3655 3. The memmove() emulation function in pcre_internal.h, which is used on
3656 systems that lack both memmove() and bcopy() - that is, hardly ever -
3657 was missing a "static" storage class specifier.
3659 4. When UTF-8 mode was not set, PCRE looped when compiling certain patterns
3660 containing an extended class (one that cannot be represented by a bitmap
3661 because it contains high-valued characters or Unicode property items, e.g.
3662 [\pZ]). Almost always one would set UTF-8 mode when processing such a
3663 pattern, but PCRE should not loop if you do not (it no longer does).
3664 [Detail: two cases were found: (a) a repeated subpattern containing an
3665 extended class; (b) a recursive reference to a subpattern that followed a
3666 previous extended class. It wasn't skipping over the extended class
3667 correctly when UTF-8 mode was not set.]
3669 5. A negated single-character class was not being recognized as fixed-length
3670 in lookbehind assertions such as (?<=[^f]), leading to an incorrect
3671 compile error "lookbehind assertion is not fixed length".
3673 6. The RunPerlTest auxiliary script was showing an unexpected difference
3674 between PCRE and Perl for UTF-8 tests. It turns out that it is hard to
3675 write a Perl script that can interpret lines of an input file either as
3676 byte characters or as UTF-8, which is what "perltest" was being required to
3677 do for the non-UTF-8 and UTF-8 tests, respectively. Essentially what you
3678 can't do is switch easily at run time between having the "use utf8;" pragma
3679 or not. In the end, I fudged it by using the RunPerlTest script to insert
3680 "use utf8;" explicitly for the UTF-8 tests.
3682 7. In multiline (/m) mode, PCRE was matching ^ after a terminating newline at
3683 the end of the subject string, contrary to the documentation and to what
3684 Perl does. This was true of both matching functions. Now it matches only at
3685 the start of the subject and immediately after *internal* newlines.
3687 8. A call of pcre_fullinfo() from pcretest to get the option bits was passing
3688 a pointer to an int instead of a pointer to an unsigned long int. This
3689 caused problems on 64-bit systems.
3691 9. Applied a patch from the folks at Google to pcrecpp.cc, to fix "another
3692 instance of the 'standard' template library not being so standard".
3694 10. There was no check on the number of named subpatterns nor the maximum
3695 length of a subpattern name. The product of these values is used to compute
3696 the size of the memory block for a compiled pattern. By supplying a very
3697 long subpattern name and a large number of named subpatterns, the size
3698 computation could be caused to overflow. This is now prevented by limiting
3699 the length of names to 32 characters, and the number of named subpatterns
3702 11. Subpatterns that are repeated with specific counts have to be replicated in
3703 the compiled pattern. The size of memory for this was computed from the
3704 length of the subpattern and the repeat count. The latter is limited to
3705 65535, but there was no limit on the former, meaning that integer overflow
3706 could in principle occur. The compiled length of a repeated subpattern is
3707 now limited to 30,000 bytes in order to prevent this.
3709 12. Added the optional facility to have named substrings with the same name.
3711 13. Added the ability to use a named substring as a condition, using the
3712 Python syntax: (?(name)yes|no). This overloads (?(R)... and names that
3713 are numbers (not recommended). Forward references are permitted.
3715 14. Added forward references in named backreferences (if you see what I mean).
3717 15. In UTF-8 mode, with the PCRE_DOTALL option set, a quantified dot in the
3718 pattern could run off the end of the subject. For example, the pattern
3719 "(?s)(.{1,5})"8 did this with the subject "ab".
3721 16. If PCRE_DOTALL or PCRE_MULTILINE were set, pcre_dfa_exec() behaved as if
3722 PCRE_CASELESS was set when matching characters that were quantified with ?
3725 17. A character class other than a single negated character that had a minimum
3726 but no maximum quantifier - for example [ab]{6,} - was not handled
3727 correctly by pce_dfa_exec(). It would match only one character.
3729 18. A valid (though odd) pattern that looked like a POSIX character
3730 class but used an invalid character after [ (for example [[,abc,]]) caused
3731 pcre_compile() to give the error "Failed: internal error: code overflow" or
3732 in some cases to crash with a glibc free() error. This could even happen if
3733 the pattern terminated after [[ but there just happened to be a sequence of
3734 letters, a binary zero, and a closing ] in the memory that followed.
3736 19. Perl's treatment of octal escapes in the range \400 to \777 has changed
3737 over the years. Originally (before any Unicode support), just the bottom 8
3738 bits were taken. Thus, for example, \500 really meant \100. Nowadays the
3739 output from "man perlunicode" includes this:
3741 The regular expression compiler produces polymorphic opcodes. That
3742 is, the pattern adapts to the data and automatically switches to
3743 the Unicode character scheme when presented with Unicode data--or
3744 instead uses a traditional byte scheme when presented with byte
3747 Sadly, a wide octal escape does not cause a switch, and in a string with
3748 no other multibyte characters, these octal escapes are treated as before.
3749 Thus, in Perl, the pattern /\500/ actually matches \100 but the pattern
3750 /\500|\x{1ff}/ matches \500 or \777 because the whole thing is treated as a
3753 I have not perpetrated such confusion in PCRE. Up till now, it took just
3754 the bottom 8 bits, as in old Perl. I have now made octal escapes with
3755 values greater than \377 illegal in non-UTF-8 mode. In UTF-8 mode they
3756 translate to the appropriate multibyte character.
3758 29. Applied some refactoring to reduce the number of warnings from Microsoft
3759 and Borland compilers. This has included removing the fudge introduced
3760 seven years ago for the OS/2 compiler (see 2.02/2 below) because it caused
3761 a warning about an unused variable.
3763 21. PCRE has not included VT (character 0x0b) in the set of whitespace
3764 characters since release 4.0, because Perl (from release 5.004) does not.
3765 [Or at least, is documented not to: some releases seem to be in conflict
3766 with the documentation.] However, when a pattern was studied with
3767 pcre_study() and all its branches started with \s, PCRE still included VT
3768 as a possible starting character. Of course, this did no harm; it just
3769 caused an unnecessary match attempt.
3771 22. Removed a now-redundant internal flag bit that recorded the fact that case
3772 dependency changed within the pattern. This was once needed for "required
3773 byte" processing, but is no longer used. This recovers a now-scarce options
3774 bit. Also moved the least significant internal flag bit to the most-
3775 significant bit of the word, which was not previously used (hangover from
3776 the days when it was an int rather than a uint) to free up another bit for
3779 23. Added support for CRLF line endings as well as CR and LF. As well as the
3780 default being selectable at build time, it can now be changed at runtime
3781 via the PCRE_NEWLINE_xxx flags. There are now options for pcregrep to
3782 specify that it is scanning data with non-default line endings.
3784 24. Changed the definition of CXXLINK to make it agree with the definition of
3785 LINK in the Makefile, by replacing LDFLAGS to CXXFLAGS.
3787 25. Applied Ian Taylor's patches to avoid using another stack frame for tail
3788 recursions. This makes a big different to stack usage for some patterns.
3790 26. If a subpattern containing a named recursion or subroutine reference such
3791 as (?P>B) was quantified, for example (xxx(?P>B)){3}, the calculation of
3792 the space required for the compiled pattern went wrong and gave too small a
3793 value. Depending on the environment, this could lead to "Failed: internal
3794 error: code overflow at offset 49" or "glibc detected double free or
3797 27. Applied patches from Google (a) to support the new newline modes and (b) to
3798 advance over multibyte UTF-8 characters in GlobalReplace.
3800 28. Change free() to pcre_free() in pcredemo.c. Apparently this makes a
3801 difference for some implementation of PCRE in some Windows version.
3803 29. Added some extra testing facilities to pcretest:
3805 \q<number> in a data line sets the "match limit" value
3806 \Q<number> in a data line sets the "match recursion limt" value
3807 -S <number> sets the stack size, where <number> is in megabytes
3809 The -S option isn't available for Windows.
3812 Version 6.6 06-Feb-06
3813 ---------------------
3815 1. Change 16(a) for 6.5 broke things, because PCRE_DATA_SCOPE was not defined
3816 in pcreposix.h. I have copied the definition from pcre.h.
3818 2. Change 25 for 6.5 broke compilation in a build directory out-of-tree
3819 because pcre.h is no longer a built file.
3821 3. Added Jeff Friedl's additional debugging patches to pcregrep. These are
3822 not normally included in the compiled code.
3825 Version 6.5 01-Feb-06
3826 ---------------------
3828 1. When using the partial match feature with pcre_dfa_exec(), it was not
3829 anchoring the second and subsequent partial matches at the new starting
3830 point. This could lead to incorrect results. For example, with the pattern
3831 /1234/, partially matching against "123" and then "a4" gave a match.
3833 2. Changes to pcregrep:
3835 (a) All non-match returns from pcre_exec() were being treated as failures
3836 to match the line. Now, unless the error is PCRE_ERROR_NOMATCH, an
3837 error message is output. Some extra information is given for the
3838 PCRE_ERROR_MATCHLIMIT and PCRE_ERROR_RECURSIONLIMIT errors, which are
3839 probably the only errors that are likely to be caused by users (by
3840 specifying a regex that has nested indefinite repeats, for instance).
3841 If there are more than 20 of these errors, pcregrep is abandoned.
3843 (b) A binary zero was treated as data while matching, but terminated the
3844 output line if it was written out. This has been fixed: binary zeroes
3845 are now no different to any other data bytes.
3847 (c) Whichever of the LC_ALL or LC_CTYPE environment variables is set is
3848 used to set a locale for matching. The --locale=xxxx long option has
3849 been added (no short equivalent) to specify a locale explicitly on the
3850 pcregrep command, overriding the environment variables.
3852 (d) When -B was used with -n, some line numbers in the output were one less
3853 than they should have been.
3855 (e) Added the -o (--only-matching) option.
3857 (f) If -A or -C was used with -c (count only), some lines of context were
3858 accidentally printed for the final match.
3860 (g) Added the -H (--with-filename) option.
3862 (h) The combination of options -rh failed to suppress file names for files
3863 that were found from directory arguments.
3865 (i) Added the -D (--devices) and -d (--directories) options.
3867 (j) Added the -F (--fixed-strings) option.
3869 (k) Allow "-" to be used as a file name for -f as well as for a data file.
3871 (l) Added the --colo(u)r option.
3873 (m) Added Jeffrey Friedl's -S testing option, but within #ifdefs so that it
3874 is not present by default.
3876 3. A nasty bug was discovered in the handling of recursive patterns, that is,
3877 items such as (?R) or (?1), when the recursion could match a number of
3878 alternatives. If it matched one of the alternatives, but subsequently,
3879 outside the recursion, there was a failure, the code tried to back up into
3880 the recursion. However, because of the way PCRE is implemented, this is not
3881 possible, and the result was an incorrect result from the match.
3883 In order to prevent this happening, the specification of recursion has
3884 been changed so that all such subpatterns are automatically treated as
3885 atomic groups. Thus, for example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)).
3887 4. I had overlooked the fact that, in some locales, there are characters for
3888 which isalpha() is true but neither isupper() nor islower() are true. In
3889 the fr_FR locale, for instance, the \xAA and \xBA characters (ordmasculine
3890 and ordfeminine) are like this. This affected the treatment of \w and \W
3891 when they appeared in character classes, but not when they appeared outside
3892 a character class. The bit map for "word" characters is now created
3893 separately from the results of isalnum() instead of just taking it from the
3894 upper, lower, and digit maps. (Plus the underscore character, of course.)
3896 5. The above bug also affected the handling of POSIX character classes such as
3897 [[:alpha:]] and [[:alnum:]]. These do not have their own bit maps in PCRE's
3898 permanent tables. Instead, the bit maps for such a class were previously
3899 created as the appropriate unions of the upper, lower, and digit bitmaps.
3900 Now they are created by subtraction from the [[:word:]] class, which has
3903 6. The [[:blank:]] character class matches horizontal, but not vertical space.
3904 It is created by subtracting the vertical space characters (\x09, \x0a,
3905 \x0b, \x0c) from the [[:space:]] bitmap. Previously, however, the
3906 subtraction was done in the overall bitmap for a character class, meaning
3907 that a class such as [\x0c[:blank:]] was incorrect because \x0c would not
3908 be recognized. This bug has been fixed.
3910 7. Patches from the folks at Google:
3912 (a) pcrecpp.cc: "to handle a corner case that may or may not happen in
3913 real life, but is still worth protecting against".
3915 (b) pcrecpp.cc: "corrects a bug when negative radixes are used with
3916 regular expressions".
3918 (c) pcre_scanner.cc: avoid use of std::count() because not all systems
3921 (d) Split off pcrecpparg.h from pcrecpp.h and had the former built by
3922 "configure" and the latter not, in order to fix a problem somebody had
3923 with compiling the Arg class on HP-UX.
3925 (e) Improve the error-handling of the C++ wrapper a little bit.
3927 (f) New tests for checking recursion limiting.
3929 8. The pcre_memmove() function, which is used only if the environment does not
3930 have a standard memmove() function (and is therefore rarely compiled),
3931 contained two bugs: (a) use of int instead of size_t, and (b) it was not
3932 returning a result (though PCRE never actually uses the result).
3934 9. In the POSIX regexec() interface, if nmatch is specified as a ridiculously
3935 large number - greater than INT_MAX/(3*sizeof(int)) - REG_ESPACE is
3936 returned instead of calling malloc() with an overflowing number that would
3937 most likely cause subsequent chaos.
3939 10. The debugging option of pcretest was not showing the NO_AUTO_CAPTURE flag.
3941 11. The POSIX flag REG_NOSUB is now supported. When a pattern that was compiled
3942 with this option is matched, the nmatch and pmatch options of regexec() are
3945 12. Added REG_UTF8 to the POSIX interface. This is not defined by POSIX, but is
3946 provided in case anyone wants to the the POSIX interface with UTF-8
3949 13. Added CXXLDFLAGS to the Makefile parameters to provide settings only on the
3950 C++ linking (needed for some HP-UX environments).
3952 14. Avoid compiler warnings in get_ucpname() when compiled without UCP support
3953 (unused parameter) and in the pcre_printint() function (omitted "default"
3954 switch label when the default is to do nothing).
3956 15. Added some code to make it possible, when PCRE is compiled as a C++
3957 library, to replace subject pointers for pcre_exec() with a smart pointer
3958 class, thus making it possible to process discontinuous strings.
3960 16. The two macros PCRE_EXPORT and PCRE_DATA_SCOPE are confusing, and perform
3961 much the same function. They were added by different people who were trying
3962 to make PCRE easy to compile on non-Unix systems. It has been suggested
3963 that PCRE_EXPORT be abolished now that there is more automatic apparatus
3964 for compiling on Windows systems. I have therefore replaced it with
3965 PCRE_DATA_SCOPE. This is set automatically for Windows; if not set it
3966 defaults to "extern" for C or "extern C" for C++, which works fine on
3967 Unix-like systems. It is now possible to override the value of PCRE_DATA_
3968 SCOPE with something explicit in config.h. In addition:
3970 (a) pcreposix.h still had just "extern" instead of either of these macros;
3971 I have replaced it with PCRE_DATA_SCOPE.
3973 (b) Functions such as _pcre_xclass(), which are internal to the library,
3974 but external in the C sense, all had PCRE_EXPORT in their definitions.
3975 This is apparently wrong for the Windows case, so I have removed it.
3976 (It makes no difference on Unix-like systems.)
3978 17. Added a new limit, MATCH_LIMIT_RECURSION, which limits the depth of nesting
3979 of recursive calls to match(). This is different to MATCH_LIMIT because
3980 that limits the total number of calls to match(), not all of which increase
3981 the depth of recursion. Limiting the recursion depth limits the amount of
3982 stack (or heap if NO_RECURSE is set) that is used. The default can be set
3983 when PCRE is compiled, and changed at run time. A patch from Google adds
3984 this functionality to the C++ interface.
3986 18. Changes to the handling of Unicode character properties:
3988 (a) Updated the table to Unicode 4.1.0.
3990 (b) Recognize characters that are not in the table as "Cn" (undefined).
3992 (c) I revised the way the table is implemented to a much improved format
3993 which includes recognition of ranges. It now supports the ranges that
3994 are defined in UnicodeData.txt, and it also amalgamates other
3995 characters into ranges. This has reduced the number of entries in the
3996 table from around 16,000 to around 3,000, thus reducing its size
3997 considerably. I realized I did not need to use a tree structure after
3998 all - a binary chop search is just as efficient. Having reduced the
3999 number of entries, I extended their size from 6 bytes to 8 bytes to
4000 allow for more data.
4002 (d) Added support for Unicode script names via properties such as \p{Han}.
4004 19. In UTF-8 mode, a backslash followed by a non-Ascii character was not
4005 matching that character.
4007 20. When matching a repeated Unicode property with a minimum greater than zero,
4008 (for example \pL{2,}), PCRE could look past the end of the subject if it
4009 reached it while seeking the minimum number of characters. This could
4010 happen only if some of the characters were more than one byte long, because
4011 there is a check for at least the minimum number of bytes.
4013 21. Refactored the implementation of \p and \P so as to be more general, to
4014 allow for more different types of property in future. This has changed the
4015 compiled form incompatibly. Anybody with saved compiled patterns that use
4016 \p or \P will have to recompile them.
4018 22. Added "Any" and "L&" to the supported property types.
4020 23. Recognize \x{...} as a code point specifier, even when not in UTF-8 mode,
4021 but give a compile time error if the value is greater than 0xff.
4023 24. The man pages for pcrepartial, pcreprecompile, and pcre_compile2 were
4024 accidentally not being installed or uninstalled.
4026 25. The pcre.h file was built from pcre.h.in, but the only changes that were
4027 made were to insert the current release number. This seemed silly, because
4028 it made things harder for people building PCRE on systems that don't run
4029 "configure". I have turned pcre.h into a distributed file, no longer built
4030 by "configure", with the version identification directly included. There is
4031 no longer a pcre.h.in file.
4033 However, this change necessitated a change to the pcre-config script as
4034 well. It is built from pcre-config.in, and one of the substitutions was the
4035 release number. I have updated configure.ac so that ./configure now finds
4036 the release number by grepping pcre.h.
4038 26. Added the ability to run the tests under valgrind.
4041 Version 6.4 05-Sep-05
4042 ---------------------
4044 1. Change 6.0/10/(l) to pcregrep introduced a bug that caused separator lines
4045 "--" to be printed when multiple files were scanned, even when none of the
4046 -A, -B, or -C options were used. This is not compatible with Gnu grep, so I
4047 consider it to be a bug, and have restored the previous behaviour.
4049 2. A couple of code tidies to get rid of compiler warnings.
4051 3. The pcretest program used to cheat by referring to symbols in the library
4052 whose names begin with _pcre_. These are internal symbols that are not
4053 really supposed to be visible externally, and in some environments it is
4054 possible to suppress them. The cheating is now confined to including
4055 certain files from the library's source, which is a bit cleaner.
4057 4. Renamed pcre.in as pcre.h.in to go with pcrecpp.h.in; it also makes the
4058 file's purpose clearer.
4060 5. Reorganized pcre_ucp_findchar().
4063 Version 6.3 15-Aug-05
4064 ---------------------
4066 1. The file libpcre.pc.in did not have general read permission in the tarball.
4068 2. There were some problems when building without C++ support:
4070 (a) If C++ support was not built, "make install" and "make test" still
4073 (b) There were problems when the value of CXX was explicitly set. Some
4074 changes have been made to try to fix these, and ...
4076 (c) --disable-cpp can now be used to explicitly disable C++ support.
4078 (d) The use of @CPP_OBJ@ directly caused a blank line preceded by a
4079 backslash in a target when C++ was disabled. This confuses some
4080 versions of "make", apparently. Using an intermediate variable solves
4081 this. (Same for CPP_LOBJ.)
4083 3. $(LINK_FOR_BUILD) now includes $(CFLAGS_FOR_BUILD) and $(LINK)
4084 (non-Windows) now includes $(CFLAGS) because these flags are sometimes
4085 necessary on certain architectures.
4087 4. Added a setting of -export-symbols-regex to the link command to remove
4088 those symbols that are exported in the C sense, but actually are local
4089 within the library, and not documented. Their names all begin with
4090 "_pcre_". This is not a perfect job, because (a) we have to except some
4091 symbols that pcretest ("illegally") uses, and (b) the facility isn't always
4092 available (and never for static libraries). I have made a note to try to
4093 find a way round (a) in the future.
4096 Version 6.2 01-Aug-05
4097 ---------------------
4099 1. There was no test for integer overflow of quantifier values. A construction
4100 such as {1111111111111111} would give undefined results. What is worse, if
4101 a minimum quantifier for a parenthesized subpattern overflowed and became
4102 negative, the calculation of the memory size went wrong. This could have
4103 led to memory overwriting.
4105 2. Building PCRE using VPATH was broken. Hopefully it is now fixed.
4107 3. Added "b" to the 2nd argument of fopen() in dftables.c, for non-Unix-like
4108 operating environments where this matters.
4110 4. Applied Giuseppe Maxia's patch to add additional features for controlling
4111 PCRE options from within the C++ wrapper.
4113 5. Named capturing subpatterns were not being correctly counted when a pattern
4114 was compiled. This caused two problems: (a) If there were more than 100
4115 such subpatterns, the calculation of the memory needed for the whole
4116 compiled pattern went wrong, leading to an overflow error. (b) Numerical
4117 back references of the form \12, where the number was greater than 9, were
4118 not recognized as back references, even though there were sufficient
4119 previous subpatterns.
4121 6. Two minor patches to pcrecpp.cc in order to allow it to compile on older
4122 versions of gcc, e.g. 2.95.4.
4125 Version 6.1 21-Jun-05
4126 ---------------------
4128 1. There was one reference to the variable "posix" in pcretest.c that was not
4129 surrounded by "#if !defined NOPOSIX".
4131 2. Make it possible to compile pcretest without DFA support, UTF8 support, or
4132 the cross-check on the old pcre_info() function, for the benefit of the
4133 cut-down version of PCRE that is currently imported into Exim.
4135 3. A (silly) pattern starting with (?i)(?-i) caused an internal space
4136 allocation error. I've done the easy fix, which wastes 2 bytes for sensible
4137 patterns that start (?i) but I don't think that matters. The use of (?i) is
4138 just an example; this all applies to the other options as well.
4140 4. Since libtool seems to echo the compile commands it is issuing, the output
4141 from "make" can be reduced a bit by putting "@" in front of each libtool
4144 5. Patch from the folks at Google for configure.in to be a bit more thorough
4145 in checking for a suitable C++ installation before trying to compile the
4146 C++ stuff. This should fix a reported problem when a compiler was present,
4147 but no suitable headers.
4149 6. The man pages all had just "PCRE" as their title. I have changed them to
4150 be the relevant file name. I have also arranged that these names are
4151 retained in the file doc/pcre.txt, which is a concatenation in text format
4152 of all the man pages except the little individual ones for each function.
4154 7. The NON-UNIX-USE file had not been updated for the different set of source
4155 files that come with release 6. I also added a few comments about the C++
4159 Version 6.0 07-Jun-05
4160 ---------------------
4162 1. Some minor internal re-organization to help with my DFA experiments.
4164 2. Some missing #ifdef SUPPORT_UCP conditionals in pcretest and printint that
4165 didn't matter for the library itself when fully configured, but did matter
4166 when compiling without UCP support, or within Exim, where the ucp files are
4169 3. Refactoring of the library code to split up the various functions into
4170 different source modules. The addition of the new DFA matching code (see
4171 below) to a single monolithic source would have made it really too
4172 unwieldy, quite apart from causing all the code to be include in a
4173 statically linked application, when only some functions are used. This is
4174 relevant even without the DFA addition now that patterns can be compiled in
4175 one application and matched in another.
4177 The downside of splitting up is that there have to be some external
4178 functions and data tables that are used internally in different modules of
4179 the library but which are not part of the API. These have all had their
4180 names changed to start with "_pcre_" so that they are unlikely to clash
4181 with other external names.
4183 4. Added an alternate matching function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which matches using
4184 a different (DFA) algorithm. Although it is slower than the original
4185 function, it does have some advantages for certain types of matching
4188 5. Upgrades to pcretest in order to test the features of pcre_dfa_exec(),
4189 including restarting after a partial match.
4191 6. A patch for pcregrep that defines INVALID_FILE_ATTRIBUTES if it is not
4192 defined when compiling for Windows was sent to me. I have put it into the
4193 code, though I have no means of testing or verifying it.
4195 7. Added the pcre_refcount() auxiliary function.
4197 8. Added the PCRE_FIRSTLINE option. This constrains an unanchored pattern to
4198 match before or at the first newline in the subject string. In pcretest,
4199 the /f option on a pattern can be used to set this.
4201 9. A repeated \w when used in UTF-8 mode with characters greater than 256
4202 would behave wrongly. This has been present in PCRE since release 4.0.
4204 10. A number of changes to the pcregrep command:
4206 (a) Refactored how -x works; insert ^(...)$ instead of setting
4207 PCRE_ANCHORED and checking the length, in preparation for adding
4208 something similar for -w.
4210 (b) Added the -w (match as a word) option.
4212 (c) Refactored the way lines are read and buffered so as to have more
4213 than one at a time available.
4215 (d) Implemented a pcregrep test script.
4217 (e) Added the -M (multiline match) option. This allows patterns to match
4218 over several lines of the subject. The buffering ensures that at least
4219 8K, or the rest of the document (whichever is the shorter) is available
4220 for matching (and similarly the previous 8K for lookbehind assertions).
4222 (f) Changed the --help output so that it now says
4226 instead of two lines, one with "regex" and the other with "regexp"
4227 because that confused at least one person since the short forms are the
4228 same. (This required a bit of code, as the output is generated
4229 automatically from a table. It wasn't just a text change.)
4231 (g) -- can be used to terminate pcregrep options if the next thing isn't an
4232 option but starts with a hyphen. Could be a pattern or a path name
4233 starting with a hyphen, for instance.
4235 (h) "-" can be given as a file name to represent stdin.
4237 (i) When file names are being printed, "(standard input)" is used for
4238 the standard input, for compatibility with GNU grep. Previously
4241 (j) The option --label=xxx can be used to supply a name to be used for
4242 stdin when file names are being printed. There is no short form.
4244 (k) Re-factored the options decoding logic because we are going to add
4245 two more options that take data. Such options can now be given in four
4246 different ways, e.g. "-fname", "-f name", "--file=name", "--file name".
4248 (l) Added the -A, -B, and -C options for requesting that lines of context
4249 around matches be printed.
4251 (m) Added the -L option to print the names of files that do not contain
4252 any matching lines, that is, the complement of -l.
4254 (n) The return code is 2 if any file cannot be opened, but pcregrep does
4255 continue to scan other files.
4257 (o) The -s option was incorrectly implemented. For compatibility with other
4258 greps, it now suppresses the error message for a non-existent or non-
4259 accessible file (but not the return code). There is a new option called
4260 -q that suppresses the output of matching lines, which was what -s was
4263 (p) Added --include and --exclude options to specify files for inclusion
4264 and exclusion when recursing.
4266 11. The Makefile was not using the Autoconf-supported LDFLAGS macro properly.
4267 Hopefully, it now does.
4269 12. Missing cast in pcre_study().
4271 13. Added an "uninstall" target to the makefile.
4273 14. Replaced "extern" in the function prototypes in Makefile.in with
4274 "PCRE_DATA_SCOPE", which defaults to 'extern' or 'extern "C"' in the Unix
4275 world, but is set differently for Windows.
4277 15. Added a second compiling function called pcre_compile2(). The only
4278 difference is that it has an extra argument, which is a pointer to an
4279 integer error code. When there is a compile-time failure, this is set
4280 non-zero, in addition to the error test pointer being set to point to an
4281 error message. The new argument may be NULL if no error number is required
4282 (but then you may as well call pcre_compile(), which is now just a
4283 wrapper). This facility is provided because some applications need a
4284 numeric error indication, but it has also enabled me to tidy up the way
4285 compile-time errors are handled in the POSIX wrapper.
4287 16. Added VPATH=.libs to the makefile; this should help when building with one
4288 prefix path and installing with another. (Or so I'm told by someone who
4289 knows more about this stuff than I do.)
4291 17. Added a new option, REG_DOTALL, to the POSIX function regcomp(). This
4292 passes PCRE_DOTALL to the pcre_compile() function, making the "." character
4293 match everything, including newlines. This is not POSIX-compatible, but
4294 somebody wanted the feature. From pcretest it can be activated by using
4295 both the P and the s flags.
4297 18. AC_PROG_LIBTOOL appeared twice in Makefile.in. Removed one.
4299 19. libpcre.pc was being incorrectly installed as executable.
4301 20. A couple of places in pcretest check for end-of-line by looking for '\n';
4302 it now also looks for '\r' so that it will work unmodified on Windows.
4304 21. Added Google's contributed C++ wrapper to the distribution.
4306 22. Added some untidy missing memory free() calls in pcretest, to keep
4307 Electric Fence happy when testing.
4311 Version 5.0 13-Sep-04
4312 ---------------------
4314 1. Internal change: literal characters are no longer packed up into items
4315 containing multiple characters in a single byte-string. Each character
4316 is now matched using a separate opcode. However, there may be more than one
4317 byte in the character in UTF-8 mode.
4319 2. The pcre_callout_block structure has two new fields: pattern_position and
4320 next_item_length. These contain the offset in the pattern to the next match
4321 item, and its length, respectively.
4323 3. The PCRE_AUTO_CALLOUT option for pcre_compile() requests the automatic
4324 insertion of callouts before each pattern item. Added the /C option to
4325 pcretest to make use of this.
4327 4. On the advice of a Windows user, the lines
4329 #if defined(_WIN32) || defined(WIN32)
4330 _setmode( _fileno( stdout ), 0x8000 );
4331 #endif /* defined(_WIN32) || defined(WIN32) */
4333 have been added to the source of pcretest. This apparently does useful
4334 magic in relation to line terminators.
4336 5. Changed "r" and "w" in the calls to fopen() in pcretest to "rb" and "wb"
4337 for the benefit of those environments where the "b" makes a difference.
4339 6. The icc compiler has the same options as gcc, but "configure" doesn't seem
4340 to know about it. I have put a hack into configure.in that adds in code
4341 to set GCC=yes if CC=icc. This seems to end up at a point in the
4342 generated configure script that is early enough to affect the setting of
4343 compiler options, which is what is needed, but I have no means of testing
4344 whether it really works. (The user who reported this had patched the
4345 generated configure script, which of course I cannot do.)
4347 LATER: After change 22 below (new libtool files), the configure script
4348 seems to know about icc (and also ecc). Therefore, I have commented out
4349 this hack in configure.in.
4351 7. Added support for pkg-config (2 patches were sent in).
4353 8. Negated POSIX character classes that used a combination of internal tables
4354 were completely broken. These were [[:^alpha:]], [[:^alnum:]], and
4355 [[:^ascii]]. Typically, they would match almost any characters. The other
4356 POSIX classes were not broken in this way.
4358 9. Matching the pattern "\b.*?" against "ab cd", starting at offset 1, failed
4359 to find the match, as PCRE was deluded into thinking that the match had to
4360 start at the start point or following a newline. The same bug applied to
4361 patterns with negative forward assertions or any backward assertions
4362 preceding ".*" at the start, unless the pattern required a fixed first
4363 character. This was a failing pattern: "(?!.bcd).*". The bug is now fixed.
4365 10. In UTF-8 mode, when moving forwards in the subject after a failed match
4366 starting at the last subject character, bytes beyond the end of the subject
4369 11. Renamed the variable "class" as "classbits" to make life easier for C++
4370 users. (Previously there was a macro definition, but it apparently wasn't
4373 12. Added the new field "tables" to the extra data so that tables can be passed
4374 in at exec time, or the internal tables can be re-selected. This allows
4375 a compiled regex to be saved and re-used at a later time by a different
4376 program that might have everything at different addresses.
4378 13. Modified the pcre-config script so that, when run on Solaris, it shows a
4379 -R library as well as a -L library.
4381 14. The debugging options of pcretest (-d on the command line or D on a
4382 pattern) showed incorrect output for anything following an extended class
4383 that contained multibyte characters and which was followed by a quantifier.
4385 15. Added optional support for general category Unicode character properties
4386 via the \p, \P, and \X escapes. Unicode property support implies UTF-8
4387 support. It adds about 90K to the size of the library. The meanings of the
4388 inbuilt class escapes such as \d and \s have NOT been changed.
4390 16. Updated pcredemo.c to include calls to free() to release the memory for the
4393 17. The generated file chartables.c was being created in the source directory
4394 instead of in the building directory. This caused the build to fail if the
4395 source directory was different from the building directory, and was
4398 18. Added some sample Win commands from Mark Tetrode into the NON-UNIX-USE
4399 file. No doubt somebody will tell me if they don't make sense... Also added
4400 Dan Mooney's comments about building on OpenVMS.
4402 19. Added support for partial matching via the PCRE_PARTIAL option for
4403 pcre_exec() and the \P data escape in pcretest.
4405 20. Extended pcretest with 3 new pattern features:
4407 (i) A pattern option of the form ">rest-of-line" causes pcretest to
4408 write the compiled pattern to the file whose name is "rest-of-line".
4409 This is a straight binary dump of the data, with the saved pointer to
4410 the character tables forced to be NULL. The study data, if any, is
4411 written too. After writing, pcretest reads a new pattern.
4413 (ii) If, instead of a pattern, "<rest-of-line" is given, pcretest reads a
4414 compiled pattern from the given file. There must not be any
4415 occurrences of "<" in the file name (pretty unlikely); if there are,
4416 pcretest will instead treat the initial "<" as a pattern delimiter.
4417 After reading in the pattern, pcretest goes on to read data lines as
4420 (iii) The F pattern option causes pcretest to flip the bytes in the 32-bit
4421 and 16-bit fields in a compiled pattern, to simulate a pattern that
4422 was compiled on a host of opposite endianness.
4424 21. The pcre-exec() function can now cope with patterns that were compiled on
4425 hosts of opposite endianness, with this restriction:
4427 As for any compiled expression that is saved and used later, the tables
4428 pointer field cannot be preserved; the extra_data field in the arguments
4429 to pcre_exec() should be used to pass in a tables address if a value
4430 other than the default internal tables were used at compile time.
4432 22. Calling pcre_exec() with a negative value of the "ovecsize" parameter is
4433 now diagnosed as an error. Previously, most of the time, a negative number
4434 would have been treated as zero, but if in addition "ovector" was passed as
4435 NULL, a crash could occur.
4437 23. Updated the files ltmain.sh, config.sub, config.guess, and aclocal.m4 with
4438 new versions from the libtool 1.5 distribution (the last one is a copy of
4439 a file called libtool.m4). This seems to have fixed the need to patch
4440 "configure" to support Darwin 1.3 (which I used to do). However, I still
4441 had to patch ltmain.sh to ensure that ${SED} is set (it isn't on my
4444 24. Changed the PCRE licence to be the more standard "BSD" licence.
4447 Version 4.5 01-Dec-03
4448 ---------------------
4450 1. There has been some re-arrangement of the code for the match() function so
4451 that it can be compiled in a version that does not call itself recursively.
4452 Instead, it keeps those local variables that need separate instances for
4453 each "recursion" in a frame on the heap, and gets/frees frames whenever it
4454 needs to "recurse". Keeping track of where control must go is done by means
4455 of setjmp/longjmp. The whole thing is implemented by a set of macros that
4456 hide most of the details from the main code, and operates only if
4457 NO_RECURSE is defined while compiling pcre.c. If PCRE is built using the
4458 "configure" mechanism, "--disable-stack-for-recursion" turns on this way of
4461 To make it easier for callers to provide specially tailored get/free
4462 functions for this usage, two new functions, pcre_stack_malloc, and
4463 pcre_stack_free, are used. They are always called in strict stacking order,
4464 and the size of block requested is always the same.
4466 The PCRE_CONFIG_STACKRECURSE info parameter can be used to find out whether
4467 PCRE has been compiled to use the stack or the heap for recursion. The
4468 -C option of pcretest uses this to show which version is compiled.
4470 A new data escape \S, is added to pcretest; it causes the amounts of store
4471 obtained and freed by both kinds of malloc/free at match time to be added
4474 2. Changed the locale test to use "fr_FR" instead of "fr" because that's
4475 what's available on my current Linux desktop machine.
4477 3. When matching a UTF-8 string, the test for a valid string at the start has
4478 been extended. If start_offset is not zero, PCRE now checks that it points
4479 to a byte that is the start of a UTF-8 character. If not, it returns
4480 PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET (-11). Note: the whole string is still checked;
4481 this is necessary because there may be backward assertions in the pattern.
4482 When matching the same subject several times, it may save resources to use
4483 PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK on all but the first call if the string is long.
4485 4. The code for checking the validity of UTF-8 strings has been tightened so
4486 that it rejects (a) strings containing 0xfe or 0xff bytes and (b) strings
4487 containing "overlong sequences".
4489 5. Fixed a bug (appearing twice) that I could not find any way of exploiting!
4490 I had written "if ((digitab[*p++] && chtab_digit) == 0)" where the "&&"
4491 should have been "&", but it just so happened that all the cases this let
4492 through by mistake were picked up later in the function.
4494 6. I had used a variable called "isblank" - this is a C99 function, causing
4495 some compilers to warn. To avoid this, I renamed it (as "blankclass").
4497 7. Cosmetic: (a) only output another newline at the end of pcretest if it is
4498 prompting; (b) run "./pcretest /dev/null" at the start of the test script
4499 so the version is shown; (c) stop "make test" echoing "./RunTest".
4501 8. Added patches from David Burgess to enable PCRE to run on EBCDIC systems.
4503 9. The prototype for memmove() for systems that don't have it was using
4504 size_t, but the inclusion of the header that defines size_t was later. I've
4505 moved the #includes for the C headers earlier to avoid this.
4507 10. Added some adjustments to the code to make it easier to compiler on certain
4510 (a) Some "const" qualifiers were missing.
4511 (b) Added the macro EXPORT before all exported functions; by default this
4512 is defined to be empty.
4513 (c) Changed the dftables auxiliary program (that builds chartables.c) so
4514 that it reads its output file name as an argument instead of writing
4515 to the standard output and assuming this can be redirected.
4517 11. In UTF-8 mode, if a recursive reference (e.g. (?1)) followed a character
4518 class containing characters with values greater than 255, PCRE compilation
4521 12. A recursive reference to a subpattern that was within another subpattern
4522 that had a minimum quantifier of zero caused PCRE to crash. For example,
4523 (x(y(?2))z)? provoked this bug with a subject that got as far as the
4524 recursion. If the recursively-called subpattern itself had a zero repeat,
4527 13. In pcretest, the buffer for reading a data line was set at 30K, but the
4528 buffer into which it was copied (for escape processing) was still set at
4529 1024, so long lines caused crashes.
4531 14. A pattern such as /[ab]{1,3}+/ failed to compile, giving the error
4532 "internal error: code overflow...". This applied to any character class
4533 that was followed by a possessive quantifier.
4535 15. Modified the Makefile to add libpcre.la as a prerequisite for
4536 libpcreposix.la because I was told this is needed for a parallel build to
4539 16. If a pattern that contained .* following optional items at the start was
4540 studied, the wrong optimizing data was generated, leading to matching
4541 errors. For example, studying /[ab]*.*c/ concluded, erroneously, that any
4542 matching string must start with a or b or c. The correct conclusion for
4543 this pattern is that a match can start with any character.
4546 Version 4.4 13-Aug-03
4547 ---------------------
4549 1. In UTF-8 mode, a character class containing characters with values between
4550 127 and 255 was not handled correctly if the compiled pattern was studied.
4551 In fixing this, I have also improved the studying algorithm for such
4554 2. Three internal functions had redundant arguments passed to them. Removal
4555 might give a very teeny performance improvement.
4557 3. Documentation bug: the value of the capture_top field in a callout is *one
4558 more than* the number of the hightest numbered captured substring.
4560 4. The Makefile linked pcretest and pcregrep with -lpcre, which could result
4561 in incorrectly linking with a previously installed version. They now link
4562 explicitly with libpcre.la.
4564 5. configure.in no longer needs to recognize Cygwin specially.
4566 6. A problem in pcre.in for Windows platforms is fixed.
4568 7. If a pattern was successfully studied, and the -d (or /D) flag was given to
4569 pcretest, it used to include the size of the study block as part of its
4570 output. Unfortunately, the structure contains a field that has a different
4571 size on different hardware architectures. This meant that the tests that
4572 showed this size failed. As the block is currently always of a fixed size,
4573 this information isn't actually particularly useful in pcretest output, so
4574 I have just removed it.
4576 8. Three pre-processor statements accidentally did not start in column 1.
4577 Sadly, there are *still* compilers around that complain, even though
4578 standard C has not required this for well over a decade. Sigh.
4580 9. In pcretest, the code for checking callouts passed small integers in the
4581 callout_data field, which is a void * field. However, some picky compilers
4582 complained about the casts involved for this on 64-bit systems. Now
4583 pcretest passes the address of the small integer instead, which should get
4584 rid of the warnings.
4586 10. By default, when in UTF-8 mode, PCRE now checks for valid UTF-8 strings at
4587 both compile and run time, and gives an error if an invalid UTF-8 sequence
4588 is found. There is a option for disabling this check in cases where the
4589 string is known to be correct and/or the maximum performance is wanted.
4591 11. In response to a bug report, I changed one line in Makefile.in from
4593 -Wl,--out-implib,.libs/lib@WIN_PREFIX@pcreposix.dll.a \
4595 -Wl,--out-implib,.libs/@WIN_PREFIX@libpcreposix.dll.a \
4597 to look similar to other lines, but I have no way of telling whether this
4598 is the right thing to do, as I do not use Windows. No doubt I'll get told
4602 Version 4.3 21-May-03
4603 ---------------------
4605 1. Two instances of @WIN_PREFIX@ omitted from the Windows targets in the
4608 2. Some refactoring to improve the quality of the code:
4610 (i) The utf8_table... variables are now declared "const".
4612 (ii) The code for \cx, which used the "case flipping" table to upper case
4613 lower case letters, now just substracts 32. This is ASCII-specific,
4614 but the whole concept of \cx is ASCII-specific, so it seems
4617 (iii) PCRE was using its character types table to recognize decimal and
4618 hexadecimal digits in the pattern. This is silly, because it handles
4619 only 0-9, a-f, and A-F, but the character types table is locale-
4620 specific, which means strange things might happen. A private
4621 table is now used for this - though it costs 256 bytes, a table is
4622 much faster than multiple explicit tests. Of course, the standard
4623 character types table is still used for matching digits in subject
4626 (iv) Strictly, the identifier ESC_t is reserved by POSIX (all identifiers
4627 ending in _t are). So I've renamed it as ESC_tee.
4629 3. The first argument for regexec() in the POSIX wrapper should have been
4632 4. Changed pcretest to use malloc() for its buffers so that they can be
4633 Electric Fenced for debugging.
4635 5. There were several places in the code where, in UTF-8 mode, PCRE would try
4636 to read one or more bytes before the start of the subject string. Often this
4637 had no effect on PCRE's behaviour, but in some circumstances it could
4638 provoke a segmentation fault.
4640 6. A lookbehind at the start of a pattern in UTF-8 mode could also cause PCRE
4641 to try to read one or more bytes before the start of the subject string.
4643 7. A lookbehind in a pattern matched in non-UTF-8 mode on a PCRE compiled with
4644 UTF-8 support could misbehave in various ways if the subject string
4645 contained bytes with the 0x80 bit set and the 0x40 bit unset in a lookbehind
4646 area. (PCRE was not checking for the UTF-8 mode flag, and trying to move
4647 back over UTF-8 characters.)
4650 Version 4.2 14-Apr-03
4651 ---------------------
4653 1. Typo "#if SUPPORT_UTF8" instead of "#ifdef SUPPORT_UTF8" fixed.
4655 2. Changes to the building process, supplied by Ronald Landheer-Cieslak
4656 [ON_WINDOWS]: new variable, "#" on non-Windows platforms
4657 [NOT_ON_WINDOWS]: new variable, "#" on Windows platforms
4658 [WIN_PREFIX]: new variable, "cyg" for Cygwin
4659 * Makefile.in: use autoconf substitution for OBJEXT, EXEEXT, BUILD_OBJEXT
4661 Note: automatic setting of the BUILD variables is not yet working
4662 set CPPFLAGS and BUILD_CPPFLAGS (but don't use yet) - should be used at
4663 compile-time but not at link-time
4664 [LINK]: use for linking executables only
4665 make different versions for Windows and non-Windows
4666 [LINKLIB]: new variable, copy of UNIX-style LINK, used for linking
4668 [LINK_FOR_BUILD]: new variable
4669 [OBJEXT]: use throughout
4670 [EXEEXT]: use throughout
4671 <winshared>: new target
4672 <wininstall>: new target
4673 <dftables.o>: use native compiler
4674 <dftables>: use native linker
4675 <install>: handle Windows platform correctly
4678 copy DLL to top builddir before testing
4680 As part of these changes, -no-undefined was removed again. This was reported
4681 to give trouble on HP-UX 11.0, so getting rid of it seems like a good idea
4684 3. Some tidies to get rid of compiler warnings:
4686 . In the match_data structure, match_limit was an unsigned long int, whereas
4687 match_call_count was an int. I've made them both unsigned long ints.
4689 . In pcretest the fact that a const uschar * doesn't automatically cast to
4690 a void * provoked a warning.
4692 . Turning on some more compiler warnings threw up some "shadow" variables
4693 and a few more missing casts.
4695 4. If PCRE was complied with UTF-8 support, but called without the PCRE_UTF8
4696 option, a class that contained a single character with a value between 128
4697 and 255 (e.g. /[\xFF]/) caused PCRE to crash.
4699 5. If PCRE was compiled with UTF-8 support, but called without the PCRE_UTF8
4700 option, a class that contained several characters, but with at least one
4701 whose value was between 128 and 255 caused PCRE to crash.
4704 Version 4.1 12-Mar-03
4705 ---------------------
4707 1. Compiling with gcc -pedantic found a couple of places where casts were
4708 needed, and a string in dftables.c that was longer than standard compilers are
4709 required to support.
4711 2. Compiling with Sun's compiler found a few more places where the code could
4712 be tidied up in order to avoid warnings.
4714 3. The variables for cross-compiling were called HOST_CC and HOST_CFLAGS; the
4715 first of these names is deprecated in the latest Autoconf in favour of the name
4716 CC_FOR_BUILD, because "host" is typically used to mean the system on which the
4717 compiled code will be run. I can't find a reference for HOST_CFLAGS, but by
4718 analogy I have changed it to CFLAGS_FOR_BUILD.
4720 4. Added -no-undefined to the linking command in the Makefile, because this is
4721 apparently helpful for Windows. To make it work, also added "-L. -lpcre" to the
4722 linking step for the pcreposix library.
4724 5. PCRE was failing to diagnose the case of two named groups with the same
4727 6. A problem with one of PCRE's optimizations was discovered. PCRE remembers a
4728 literal character that is needed in the subject for a match, and scans along to
4729 ensure that it is present before embarking on the full matching process. This
4730 saves time in cases of nested unlimited repeats that are never going to match.
4731 Problem: the scan can take a lot of time if the subject is very long (e.g.
4732 megabytes), thus penalizing straightforward matches. It is now done only if the
4733 amount of subject to be scanned is less than 1000 bytes.
4735 7. A lesser problem with the same optimization is that it was recording the
4736 first character of an anchored pattern as "needed", thus provoking a search
4737 right along the subject, even when the first match of the pattern was going to
4738 fail. The "needed" character is now not set for anchored patterns, unless it
4739 follows something in the pattern that is of non-fixed length. Thus, it still
4740 fulfils its original purpose of finding quick non-matches in cases of nested
4741 unlimited repeats, but isn't used for simple anchored patterns such as /^abc/.
4744 Version 4.0 17-Feb-03
4745 ---------------------
4747 1. If a comment in an extended regex that started immediately after a meta-item
4748 extended to the end of string, PCRE compiled incorrect data. This could lead to
4749 all kinds of weird effects. Example: /#/ was bad; /()#/ was bad; /a#/ was not.
4751 2. Moved to autoconf 2.53 and libtool 1.4.2.
4753 3. Perl 5.8 no longer needs "use utf8" for doing UTF-8 things. Consequently,
4754 the special perltest8 script is no longer needed - all the tests can be run
4755 from a single perltest script.
4757 4. From 5.004, Perl has not included the VT character (0x0b) in the set defined
4758 by \s. It has now been removed in PCRE. This means it isn't recognized as
4759 whitespace in /x regexes too, which is the same as Perl. Note that the POSIX
4760 class [:space:] *does* include VT, thereby creating a mess.
4762 5. Added the class [:blank:] (a GNU extension from Perl 5.8) to match only
4765 6. Perl 5.005 was a long time ago. It's time to amalgamate the tests that use
4766 its new features into the main test script, reducing the number of scripts.
4768 7. Perl 5.8 has changed the meaning of patterns like /a(?i)b/. Earlier versions
4769 were backward compatible, and made the (?i) apply to the whole pattern, as if
4770 /i were given. Now it behaves more logically, and applies the option setting
4771 only to what follows. PCRE has been changed to follow suit. However, if it
4772 finds options settings right at the start of the pattern, it extracts them into
4773 the global options, as before. Thus, they show up in the info data.
4775 8. Added support for the \Q...\E escape sequence. Characters in between are
4776 treated as literals. This is slightly different from Perl in that $ and @ are
4777 also handled as literals inside the quotes. In Perl, they will cause variable
4778 interpolation. Note the following examples:
4780 Pattern PCRE matches Perl matches
4782 \Qabc$xyz\E abc$xyz abc followed by the contents of $xyz
4783 \Qabc\$xyz\E abc\$xyz abc\$xyz
4784 \Qabc\E\$\Qxyz\E abc$xyz abc$xyz
4786 For compatibility with Perl, \Q...\E sequences are recognized inside character
4787 classes as well as outside them.
4789 9. Re-organized 3 code statements in pcretest to avoid "overflow in
4790 floating-point constant arithmetic" warnings from a Microsoft compiler. Added a
4791 (size_t) cast to one statement in pcretest and one in pcreposix to avoid
4792 signed/unsigned warnings.
4794 10. SunOS4 doesn't have strtoul(). This was used only for unpicking the -o
4795 option for pcretest, so I've replaced it by a simple function that does just
4798 11. pcregrep was ending with code 0 instead of 2 for the commands "pcregrep" or
4801 12. Added "possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's
4802 Java package. This provides some syntactic sugar for simple cases of what my
4803 documentation calls "once-only subpatterns". A pattern such as x*+ is the same
4804 as (?>x*). In other words, if what is inside (?>...) is just a single repeated
4805 item, you can use this simplified notation. Note that only makes sense with
4806 greedy quantifiers. Consequently, the use of the possessive quantifier forces
4807 greediness, whatever the setting of the PCRE_UNGREEDY option.
4809 13. A change of greediness default within a pattern was not taking effect at
4810 the current level for patterns like /(b+(?U)a+)/. It did apply to parenthesized
4811 subpatterns that followed. Patterns like /b+(?U)a+/ worked because the option
4812 was abstracted outside.
4814 14. PCRE now supports the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching
4815 position is at the start point of the match. This differs from \A when the
4816 starting offset is non-zero. Used with the /g option of pcretest (or similar
4817 code), it works in the same way as it does for Perl's /g option. If all
4818 alternatives of a regex begin with \G, the expression is anchored to the start
4819 match position, and the "anchored" flag is set in the compiled expression.
4821 15. Some bugs concerning the handling of certain option changes within patterns
4822 have been fixed. These applied to options other than (?ims). For example,
4823 "a(?x: b c )d" did not match "XabcdY" but did match "Xa b c dY". It should have
4824 been the other way round. Some of this was related to change 7 above.
4826 16. PCRE now gives errors for /[.x.]/ and /[=x=]/ as unsupported POSIX
4827 features, as Perl does. Previously, PCRE gave the warnings only for /[[.x.]]/
4828 and /[[=x=]]/. PCRE now also gives an error for /[:name:]/ because it supports
4829 POSIX classes only within a class (e.g. /[[:alpha:]]/).
4831 17. Added support for Perl's \C escape. This matches one byte, even in UTF8
4832 mode. Unlike ".", it always matches newline, whatever the setting of
4833 PCRE_DOTALL. However, PCRE does not permit \C to appear in lookbehind
4834 assertions. Perl allows it, but it doesn't (in general) work because it can't
4835 calculate the length of the lookbehind. At least, that's the case for Perl
4836 5.8.0 - I've been told they are going to document that it doesn't work in
4839 18. Added an error diagnosis for escapes that PCRE does not support: these are
4840 \L, \l, \N, \P, \p, \U, \u, and \X.
4842 19. Although correctly diagnosing a missing ']' in a character class, PCRE was
4843 reading past the end of the pattern in cases such as /[abcd/.
4845 20. PCRE was getting more memory than necessary for patterns with classes that
4846 contained both POSIX named classes and other characters, e.g. /[[:space:]abc/.
4848 21. Added some code, conditional on #ifdef VPCOMPAT, to make life easier for
4849 compiling PCRE for use with Virtual Pascal.
4851 22. Small fix to the Makefile to make it work properly if the build is done
4852 outside the source tree.
4854 23. Added a new extension: a condition to go with recursion. If a conditional
4855 subpattern starts with (?(R) the "true" branch is used if recursion has
4856 happened, whereas the "false" branch is used only at the top level.
4858 24. When there was a very long string of literal characters (over 255 bytes
4859 without UTF support, over 250 bytes with UTF support), the computation of how
4860 much memory was required could be incorrect, leading to segfaults or other
4863 25. PCRE was incorrectly assuming anchoring (either to start of subject or to
4864 start of line for a non-DOTALL pattern) when a pattern started with (.*) and
4865 there was a subsequent back reference to those brackets. This meant that, for
4866 example, /(.*)\d+\1/ failed to match "abc123bc". Unfortunately, it isn't
4867 possible to check for precisely this case. All we can do is abandon the
4868 optimization if .* occurs inside capturing brackets when there are any back
4869 references whatsoever. (See below for a better fix that came later.)
4871 26. The handling of the optimization for finding the first character of a
4872 non-anchored pattern, and for finding a character that is required later in the
4873 match were failing in some cases. This didn't break the matching; it just
4874 failed to optimize when it could. The way this is done has been re-implemented.
4876 27. Fixed typo in error message for invalid (?R item (it said "(?p").
4878 28. Added a new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl
4879 provides with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done
4880 in PCRE is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting
4881 pcre_callout to its entry point. Like pcre_malloc and pcre_free, this is a
4882 global variable. By default it is unset, which disables all calling out. To get
4883 the function called, the regex must include (?C) at appropriate points. This
4884 is, in fact, equivalent to (?C0), and any number <= 255 may be given with (?C).
4885 This provides a means of identifying different callout points. When PCRE
4886 reaches such a point in the regex, if pcre_callout has been set, the external
4887 function is called. It is provided with data in a structure called
4888 pcre_callout_block, which is defined in pcre.h. If the function returns 0,
4889 matching continues; if it returns a non-zero value, the match at the current
4890 point fails. However, backtracking will occur if possible. [This was changed
4891 later and other features added - see item 49 below.]
4893 29. pcretest is upgraded to test the callout functionality. It provides a
4894 callout function that displays information. By default, it shows the start of
4895 the match and the current position in the text. There are some new data escapes
4896 to vary what happens:
4898 \C+ in addition, show current contents of captured substrings
4899 \C- do not supply a callout function
4900 \C!n return 1 when callout number n is reached
4901 \C!n!m return 1 when callout number n is reached for the mth time
4903 30. If pcregrep was called with the -l option and just a single file name, it
4904 output "<stdin>" if a match was found, instead of the file name.
4906 31. Improve the efficiency of the POSIX API to PCRE. If the number of capturing
4907 slots is less than POSIX_MALLOC_THRESHOLD, use a block on the stack to pass to
4908 pcre_exec(). This saves a malloc/free per call. The default value of
4909 POSIX_MALLOC_THRESHOLD is 10; it can be changed by --with-posix-malloc-threshold
4912 32. The default maximum size of a compiled pattern is 64K. There have been a
4913 few cases of people hitting this limit. The code now uses macros to handle the
4914 storing of links as offsets within the compiled pattern. It defaults to 2-byte
4915 links, but this can be changed to 3 or 4 bytes by --with-link-size when
4916 configuring. Tests 2 and 5 work only with 2-byte links because they output
4917 debugging information about compiled patterns.
4919 33. Internal code re-arrangements:
4921 (a) Moved the debugging function for printing out a compiled regex into
4922 its own source file (printint.c) and used #include to pull it into
4923 pcretest.c and, when DEBUG is defined, into pcre.c, instead of having two
4926 (b) Defined the list of op-code names for debugging as a macro in
4927 internal.h so that it is next to the definition of the opcodes.
4929 (c) Defined a table of op-code lengths for simpler skipping along compiled
4930 code. This is again a macro in internal.h so that it is next to the
4931 definition of the opcodes.
4933 34. Added support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns, along the
4934 lines of Robin Houston's patch (but implemented somewhat differently).
4936 35. Further mods to the Makefile to help Win32. Also, added code to pcregrep to
4937 allow it to read and process whole directories in Win32. This code was
4938 contributed by Lionel Fourquaux; it has not been tested by me.
4940 36. Added support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is
4941 used to name a group. Names consist of alphanumerics and underscores, and must
4942 be unique. Back references use the syntax (?P=name) and recursive calls use
4943 (?P>name) which is a PCRE extension to the Python extension. Groups still have
4944 numbers. The function pcre_fullinfo() can be used after compilation to extract
4945 a name/number map. There are three relevant calls:
4947 PCRE_INFO_NAMEENTRYSIZE yields the size of each entry in the map
4948 PCRE_INFO_NAMECOUNT yields the number of entries
4949 PCRE_INFO_NAMETABLE yields a pointer to the map.
4951 The map is a vector of fixed-size entries. The size of each entry depends on
4952 the length of the longest name used. The first two bytes of each entry are the
4953 group number, most significant byte first. There follows the corresponding
4954 name, zero terminated. The names are in alphabetical order.
4956 37. Make the maximum literal string in the compiled code 250 for the non-UTF-8
4957 case instead of 255. Making it the same both with and without UTF-8 support
4958 means that the same test output works with both.
4960 38. There was a case of malloc(0) in the POSIX testing code in pcretest. Avoid
4961 calling malloc() with a zero argument.
4963 39. Change 25 above had to resort to a heavy-handed test for the .* anchoring
4964 optimization. I've improved things by keeping a bitmap of backreferences with
4965 numbers 1-31 so that if .* occurs inside capturing brackets that are not in
4966 fact referenced, the optimization can be applied. It is unlikely that a
4967 relevant occurrence of .* (i.e. one which might indicate anchoring or forcing
4968 the match to follow \n) will appear inside brackets with a number greater than
4969 31, but if it does, any back reference > 31 suppresses the optimization.
4971 40. Added a new compile-time option PCRE_NO_AUTO_CAPTURE. This has the effect
4972 of disabling numbered capturing parentheses. Any opening parenthesis that is
4973 not followed by ? behaves as if it were followed by ?: but named parentheses
4974 can still be used for capturing (and they will acquire numbers in the usual
4977 41. Redesigned the return codes from the match() function into yes/no/error so
4978 that errors can be passed back from deep inside the nested calls. A malloc
4979 failure while inside a recursive subpattern call now causes the
4980 PCRE_ERROR_NOMEMORY return instead of quietly going wrong.
4982 42. It is now possible to set a limit on the number of times the match()
4983 function is called in a call to pcre_exec(). This facility makes it possible to
4984 limit the amount of recursion and backtracking, though not in a directly
4985 obvious way, because the match() function is used in a number of different
4986 circumstances. The count starts from zero for each position in the subject
4987 string (for non-anchored patterns). The default limit is, for compatibility, a
4988 large number, namely 10 000 000. You can change this in two ways:
4990 (a) When configuring PCRE before making, you can use --with-match-limit=n
4991 to set a default value for the compiled library.
4993 (b) For each call to pcre_exec(), you can pass a pcre_extra block in which
4994 a different value is set. See 45 below.
4996 If the limit is exceeded, pcre_exec() returns PCRE_ERROR_MATCHLIMIT.
4998 43. Added a new function pcre_config(int, void *) to enable run-time extraction
4999 of things that can be changed at compile time. The first argument specifies
5000 what is wanted and the second points to where the information is to be placed.
5001 The current list of available information is:
5005 The output is an integer that is set to one if UTF-8 support is available;
5006 otherwise it is set to zero.
5010 The output is an integer that it set to the value of the code that is used for
5011 newline. It is either LF (10) or CR (13).
5013 PCRE_CONFIG_LINK_SIZE
5015 The output is an integer that contains the number of bytes used for internal
5016 linkage in compiled expressions. The value is 2, 3, or 4. See item 32 above.
5018 PCRE_CONFIG_POSIX_MALLOC_THRESHOLD
5020 The output is an integer that contains the threshold above which the POSIX
5021 interface uses malloc() for output vectors. See item 31 above.
5023 PCRE_CONFIG_MATCH_LIMIT
5025 The output is an unsigned integer that contains the default limit of the number
5026 of match() calls in a pcre_exec() execution. See 42 above.
5028 44. pcretest has been upgraded by the addition of the -C option. This causes it
5029 to extract all the available output from the new pcre_config() function, and to
5030 output it. The program then exits immediately.
5032 45. A need has arisen to pass over additional data with calls to pcre_exec() in
5033 order to support additional features. One way would have been to define
5034 pcre_exec2() (for example) with extra arguments, but this would not have been
5035 extensible, and would also have required all calls to the original function to
5036 be mapped to the new one. Instead, I have chosen to extend the mechanism that
5037 is used for passing in "extra" data from pcre_study().
5039 The pcre_extra structure is now exposed and defined in pcre.h. It currently
5040 contains the following fields:
5042 flags a bitmap indicating which of the following fields are set
5043 study_data opaque data from pcre_study()
5044 match_limit a way of specifying a limit on match() calls for a specific
5046 callout_data data for callouts (see 49 below)
5048 The flag bits are also defined in pcre.h, and are
5050 PCRE_EXTRA_STUDY_DATA
5051 PCRE_EXTRA_MATCH_LIMIT
5052 PCRE_EXTRA_CALLOUT_DATA
5054 The pcre_study() function now returns one of these new pcre_extra blocks, with
5055 the actual study data pointed to by the study_data field, and the
5056 PCRE_EXTRA_STUDY_DATA flag set. This can be passed directly to pcre_exec() as
5057 before. That is, this change is entirely upwards-compatible and requires no
5058 change to existing code.
5060 If you want to pass in additional data to pcre_exec(), you can either place it
5061 in a pcre_extra block provided by pcre_study(), or create your own pcre_extra
5064 46. pcretest has been extended to test the PCRE_EXTRA_MATCH_LIMIT feature. If a
5065 data string contains the escape sequence \M, pcretest calls pcre_exec() several
5066 times with different match limits, until it finds the minimum value needed for
5067 pcre_exec() to complete. The value is then output. This can be instructive; for
5068 most simple matches the number is quite small, but for pathological cases it
5069 gets very large very quickly.
5071 47. There's a new option for pcre_fullinfo() called PCRE_INFO_STUDYSIZE. It
5072 returns the size of the data block pointed to by the study_data field in a
5073 pcre_extra block, that is, the value that was passed as the argument to
5074 pcre_malloc() when PCRE was getting memory in which to place the information
5075 created by pcre_study(). The fourth argument should point to a size_t variable.
5076 pcretest has been extended so that this information is shown after a successful
5077 pcre_study() call when information about the compiled regex is being displayed.
5079 48. Cosmetic change to Makefile: there's no need to have / after $(DESTDIR)
5080 because what follows is always an absolute path. (Later: it turns out that this
5081 is more than cosmetic for MinGW, because it doesn't like empty path
5084 49. Some changes have been made to the callout feature (see 28 above):
5086 (i) A callout function now has three choices for what it returns:
5088 0 => success, carry on matching
5089 > 0 => failure at this point, but backtrack if possible
5090 < 0 => serious error, return this value from pcre_exec()
5092 Negative values should normally be chosen from the set of PCRE_ERROR_xxx
5093 values. In particular, returning PCRE_ERROR_NOMATCH forces a standard
5094 "match failed" error. The error number PCRE_ERROR_CALLOUT is reserved for
5095 use by callout functions. It will never be used by PCRE itself.
5097 (ii) The pcre_extra structure (see 45 above) has a void * field called
5098 callout_data, with corresponding flag bit PCRE_EXTRA_CALLOUT_DATA. The
5099 pcre_callout_block structure has a field of the same name. The contents of
5100 the field passed in the pcre_extra structure are passed to the callout
5101 function in the corresponding field in the callout block. This makes it
5102 easier to use the same callout-containing regex from multiple threads. For
5103 testing, the pcretest program has a new data escape
5105 \C*n pass the number n (may be negative) as callout_data
5107 If the callout function in pcretest receives a non-zero value as
5108 callout_data, it returns that value.
5110 50. Makefile wasn't handling CFLAGS properly when compiling dftables. Also,
5111 there were some redundant $(CFLAGS) in commands that are now specified as
5112 $(LINK), which already includes $(CFLAGS).
5114 51. Extensions to UTF-8 support are listed below. These all apply when (a) PCRE
5115 has been compiled with UTF-8 support *and* pcre_compile() has been compiled
5116 with the PCRE_UTF8 flag. Patterns that are compiled without that flag assume
5117 one-byte characters throughout. Note that case-insensitive matching applies
5118 only to characters whose values are less than 256. PCRE doesn't support the
5119 notion of cases for higher-valued characters.
5121 (i) A character class whose characters are all within 0-255 is handled as
5122 a bit map, and the map is inverted for negative classes. Previously, a
5123 character > 255 always failed to match such a class; however it should
5124 match if the class was a negative one (e.g. [^ab]). This has been fixed.
5126 (ii) A negated character class with a single character < 255 is coded as
5127 "not this character" (OP_NOT). This wasn't working properly when the test
5128 character was multibyte, either singly or repeated.
5130 (iii) Repeats of multibyte characters are now handled correctly in UTF-8
5131 mode, for example: \x{100}{2,3}.
5133 (iv) The character escapes \b, \B, \d, \D, \s, \S, \w, and \W (either
5134 singly or repeated) now correctly test multibyte characters. However,
5135 PCRE doesn't recognize any characters with values greater than 255 as
5136 digits, spaces, or word characters. Such characters always match \D, \S,
5137 and \W, and never match \d, \s, or \w.
5139 (v) Classes may now contain characters and character ranges with values
5140 greater than 255. For example: [ab\x{100}-\x{400}].
5142 (vi) pcregrep now has a --utf-8 option (synonym -u) which makes it call
5145 52. The info request value PCRE_INFO_FIRSTCHAR has been renamed
5146 PCRE_INFO_FIRSTBYTE because it is a byte value. However, the old name is
5147 retained for backwards compatibility. (Note that LASTLITERAL is also a byte
5150 53. The single man page has become too large. I have therefore split it up into
5151 a number of separate man pages. These also give rise to individual HTML pages;
5152 these are now put in a separate directory, and there is an index.html page that
5153 lists them all. Some hyperlinking between the pages has been installed.
5155 54. Added convenience functions for handling named capturing parentheses.
5157 55. Unknown escapes inside character classes (e.g. [\M]) and escapes that
5158 aren't interpreted therein (e.g. [\C]) are literals in Perl. This is now also
5159 true in PCRE, except when the PCRE_EXTENDED option is set, in which case they
5162 56. Introduced HOST_CC and HOST_CFLAGS which can be set in the environment when
5163 calling configure. These values are used when compiling the dftables.c program
5164 which is run to generate the source of the default character tables. They
5165 default to the values of CC and CFLAGS. If you are cross-compiling PCRE,
5166 you will need to set these values.
5168 57. Updated the building process for Windows DLL, as provided by Fred Cox.
5171 Version 3.9 02-Jan-02
5172 ---------------------
5174 1. A bit of extraneous text had somehow crept into the pcregrep documentation.
5176 2. If --disable-static was given, the building process failed when trying to
5177 build pcretest and pcregrep. (For some reason it was using libtool to compile
5178 them, which is not right, as they aren't part of the library.)
5181 Version 3.8 18-Dec-01
5182 ---------------------
5184 1. The experimental UTF-8 code was completely screwed up. It was packing the
5185 bytes in the wrong order. How dumb can you get?
5188 Version 3.7 29-Oct-01
5189 ---------------------
5191 1. In updating pcretest to check change 1 of version 3.6, I screwed up.
5192 This caused pcretest, when used on the test data, to segfault. Unfortunately,
5193 this didn't happen under Solaris 8, where I normally test things.
5195 2. The Makefile had to be changed to make it work on BSD systems, where 'make'
5196 doesn't seem to recognize that ./xxx and xxx are the same file. (This entry
5197 isn't in ChangeLog distributed with 3.7 because I forgot when I hastily made
5198 this fix an hour or so after the initial 3.7 release.)
5201 Version 3.6 23-Oct-01
5202 ---------------------
5204 1. Crashed with /(sens|respons)e and \1ibility/ and "sense and sensibility" if
5205 offsets passed as NULL with zero offset count.
5207 2. The config.guess and config.sub files had not been updated when I moved to
5208 the latest autoconf.
5211 Version 3.5 15-Aug-01
5212 ---------------------
5214 1. Added some missing #if !defined NOPOSIX conditionals in pcretest.c that
5217 2. By using declared but undefined structures, we can avoid using "void"
5218 definitions in pcre.h while keeping the internal definitions of the structures
5221 3. The distribution is now built using autoconf 2.50 and libtool 1.4. From a
5222 user point of view, this means that both static and shared libraries are built
5223 by default, but this can be individually controlled. More of the work of
5224 handling this static/shared cases is now inside libtool instead of PCRE's make
5227 4. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is
5228 useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets
5229 relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so
5230 there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc.
5232 5. Upgrades to pcregrep:
5233 (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep.
5234 (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase.
5235 (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories.
5236 (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file.
5238 6. pcre_exec() was referring to its "code" argument before testing that
5239 argument for NULL (and giving an error if it was NULL).
5241 7. Upgraded Makefile.in to allow for compiling in a different directory from
5242 the source directory.
5244 8. Tiny buglet in pcretest: when pcre_fullinfo() was called to retrieve the
5245 options bits, the pointer it was passed was to an int instead of to an unsigned
5246 long int. This mattered only on 64-bit systems.
5248 9. Fixed typo (3.4/1) in pcre.h again. Sigh. I had changed pcre.h (which is
5249 generated) instead of pcre.in, which it its source. Also made the same change
5250 in several of the .c files.
5252 10. A new release of gcc defines printf() as a macro, which broke pcretest
5253 because it had an ifdef in the middle of a string argument for printf(). Fixed
5254 by using separate calls to printf().
5256 11. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure
5257 script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix
5258 systems, the value can be set in config.h.
5260 12. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an
5261 absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and
5262 likewise updated the man page.
5264 13. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed.
5265 The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit.
5268 Version 3.4 22-Aug-00
5269 ---------------------
5271 1. Fixed typo in pcre.h: unsigned const char * changed to const unsigned char *.
5273 2. Diagnose condition (?(0) as an error instead of crashing on matching.
5276 Version 3.3 01-Aug-00
5277 ---------------------
5279 1. If an octal character was given, but the value was greater than \377, it
5280 was not getting masked to the least significant bits, as documented. This could
5281 lead to crashes in some systems.
5283 2. Perl 5.6 (if not earlier versions) accepts classes like [a-\d] and treats
5284 the hyphen as a literal. PCRE used to give an error; it now behaves like Perl.
5286 3. Added the functions pcre_free_substring() and pcre_free_substring_list().
5287 These just pass their arguments on to (pcre_free)(), but they are provided
5288 because some uses of PCRE bind it to non-C systems that can call its functions,
5289 but cannot call free() or pcre_free() directly.
5291 4. Add "make test" as a synonym for "make check". Corrected some comments in
5294 5. Add $(DESTDIR)/ in front of all the paths in the "install" target in the
5297 6. Changed the name of pgrep to pcregrep, because Solaris has introduced a
5298 command called pgrep for grepping around the active processes.
5300 7. Added the beginnings of support for UTF-8 character strings.
5302 8. Arranged for the Makefile to pass over the settings of CC, CFLAGS, and
5303 RANLIB to ./ltconfig so that they are used by libtool. I think these are all
5304 the relevant ones. (AR is not passed because ./ltconfig does its own figuring
5305 out for the ar command.)
5308 Version 3.2 12-May-00
5309 ---------------------
5311 This is purely a bug fixing release.
5313 1. If the pattern /((Z)+|A)*/ was matched agained ZABCDEFG it matched Z instead
5314 of ZA. This was just one example of several cases that could provoke this bug,
5315 which was introduced by change 9 of version 2.00. The code for breaking
5316 infinite loops after an iteration that matches an empty string was't working
5319 2. The pcretest program was not imitating Perl correctly for the pattern /a*/g
5320 when matched against abbab (for example). After matching an empty string, it
5321 wasn't forcing anchoring when setting PCRE_NOTEMPTY for the next attempt; this
5322 caused it to match further down the string than it should.
5324 3. The code contained an inclusion of sys/types.h. It isn't clear why this
5325 was there because it doesn't seem to be needed, and it causes trouble on some
5326 systems, as it is not a Standard C header. It has been removed.
5328 4. Made 4 silly changes to the source to avoid stupid compiler warnings that
5329 were reported on the Macintosh. The changes were from
5331 while ((c = *(++ptr)) != 0 && c != '\n');
5333 while ((c = *(++ptr)) != 0 && c != '\n') ;
5335 Totally extraordinary, but if that's what it takes...
5337 5. PCRE is being used in one environment where neither memmove() nor bcopy() is
5338 available. Added HAVE_BCOPY and an autoconf test for it; if neither
5339 HAVE_MEMMOVE nor HAVE_BCOPY is set, use a built-in emulation function which
5340 assumes the way PCRE uses memmove() (always moving upwards).
5342 6. PCRE is being used in one environment where strchr() is not available. There
5343 was only one use in pcre.c, and writing it out to avoid strchr() probably gives
5347 Version 3.1 09-Feb-00
5348 ---------------------
5350 The only change in this release is the fixing of some bugs in Makefile.in for
5351 the "install" target:
5353 (1) It was failing to install pcreposix.h.
5355 (2) It was overwriting the pcre.3 man page with the pcreposix.3 man page.
5358 Version 3.0 01-Feb-00
5359 ---------------------
5361 1. Add support for the /+ modifier to perltest (to output $` like it does in
5364 2. Add support for the /g modifier to perltest.
5366 3. Fix pcretest so that it behaves even more like Perl for /g when the pattern
5367 matches null strings.
5369 4. Fix perltest so that it doesn't do unwanted things when fed an empty
5370 pattern. Perl treats empty patterns specially - it reuses the most recent
5371 pattern, which is not what we want. Replace // by /(?#)/ in order to avoid this
5374 5. The POSIX interface was broken in that it was just handing over the POSIX
5375 captured string vector to pcre_exec(), but (since release 2.00) PCRE has
5376 required a bigger vector, with some working space on the end. This means that
5377 the POSIX wrapper now has to get and free some memory, and copy the results.
5379 6. Added some simple autoconf support, placing the test data and the
5380 documentation in separate directories, re-organizing some of the
5381 information files, and making it build pcre-config (a GNU standard). Also added
5382 libtool support for building PCRE as a shared library, which is now the
5385 7. Got rid of the leading zero in the definition of PCRE_MINOR because 08 and
5386 09 are not valid octal constants. Single digits will be used for minor values
5389 8. Defined REG_EXTENDED and REG_NOSUB as zero in the POSIX header, so that
5390 existing programs that set these in the POSIX interface can use PCRE without
5393 9. Added a new function, pcre_fullinfo() with an extensible interface. It can
5394 return all that pcre_info() returns, plus additional data. The pcre_info()
5395 function is retained for compatibility, but is considered to be obsolete.
5397 10. Added experimental recursion feature (?R) to handle one common case that
5398 Perl 5.6 will be able to do with (?p{...}).
5400 11. Added support for POSIX character classes like [:alpha:], which Perl is
5404 Version 2.08 31-Aug-99
5405 ----------------------
5407 1. When startoffset was not zero and the pattern began with ".*", PCRE was not
5408 trying to match at the startoffset position, but instead was moving forward to
5409 the next newline as if a previous match had failed.
5411 2. pcretest was not making use of PCRE_NOTEMPTY when repeating for /g and /G,
5412 and could get into a loop if a null string was matched other than at the start
5415 3. Added definitions of PCRE_MAJOR and PCRE_MINOR to pcre.h so the version can
5416 be distinguished at compile time, and for completeness also added PCRE_DATE.
5418 5. Added Paul Sokolovsky's minor changes to make it easy to compile a Win32 DLL
5419 in GnuWin32 environments.
5422 Version 2.07 29-Jul-99
5423 ----------------------
5425 1. The documentation is now supplied in plain text form and HTML as well as in
5426 the form of man page sources.
5428 2. C++ compilers don't like assigning (void *) values to other pointer types.
5429 In particular this affects malloc(). Although there is no problem in Standard
5430 C, I've put in casts to keep C++ compilers happy.
5432 3. Typo on pcretest.c; a cast of (unsigned char *) in the POSIX regexec() call
5433 should be (const char *).
5435 4. If NOPOSIX is defined, pcretest.c compiles without POSIX support. This may
5436 be useful for non-Unix systems who don't want to bother with the POSIX stuff.
5437 However, I haven't made this a standard facility. The documentation doesn't
5438 mention it, and the Makefile doesn't support it.
5440 5. The Makefile now contains an "install" target, with editable destinations at
5441 the top of the file. The pcretest program is not installed.
5443 6. pgrep -V now gives the PCRE version number and date.
5445 7. Fixed bug: a zero repetition after a literal string (e.g. /abcde{0}/) was
5446 causing the entire string to be ignored, instead of just the last character.
5448 8. If a pattern like /"([^\\"]+|\\.)*"/ is applied in the normal way to a
5449 non-matching string, it can take a very, very long time, even for strings of
5450 quite modest length, because of the nested recursion. PCRE now does better in
5451 some of these cases. It does this by remembering the last required literal
5452 character in the pattern, and pre-searching the subject to ensure it is present
5453 before running the real match. In other words, it applies a heuristic to detect
5454 some types of certain failure quickly, and in the above example, if presented
5455 with a string that has no trailing " it gives "no match" very quickly.
5457 9. A new runtime option PCRE_NOTEMPTY causes null string matches to be ignored;
5458 other alternatives are tried instead.
5461 Version 2.06 09-Jun-99
5462 ----------------------
5464 1. Change pcretest's output for amount of store used to show just the code
5465 space, because the remainder (the data block) varies in size between 32-bit and
5468 2. Added an extra argument to pcre_exec() to supply an offset in the subject to
5469 start matching at. This allows lookbehinds to work when searching for multiple
5470 occurrences in a string.
5472 3. Added additional options to pcretest for testing multiple occurrences:
5474 /+ outputs the rest of the string that follows a match
5475 /g loops for multiple occurrences, using the new startoffset argument
5476 /G loops for multiple occurrences by passing an incremented pointer
5478 4. PCRE wasn't doing the "first character" optimization for patterns starting
5479 with \b or \B, though it was doing it for other lookbehind assertions. That is,
5480 it wasn't noticing that a match for a pattern such as /\bxyz/ has to start with
5481 the letter 'x'. On long subject strings, this gives a significant speed-up.
5484 Version 2.05 21-Apr-99
5485 ----------------------
5487 1. Changed the type of magic_number from int to long int so that it works
5488 properly on 16-bit systems.
5490 2. Fixed a bug which caused patterns starting with .* not to work correctly
5491 when the subject string contained newline characters. PCRE was assuming
5492 anchoring for such patterns in all cases, which is not correct because .* will
5493 not pass a newline unless PCRE_DOTALL is set. It now assumes anchoring only if
5494 DOTALL is set at top level; otherwise it knows that patterns starting with .*
5495 must be retried after every newline in the subject.
5498 Version 2.04 18-Feb-99
5499 ----------------------
5501 1. For parenthesized subpatterns with repeats whose minimum was zero, the
5502 computation of the store needed to hold the pattern was incorrect (too large).
5503 If such patterns were nested a few deep, this could multiply and become a real
5506 2. Added /M option to pcretest to show the memory requirement of a specific
5507 pattern. Made -m a synonym of -s (which does this globally) for compatibility.
5509 3. Subpatterns of the form (regex){n,m} (i.e. limited maximum) were being
5510 compiled in such a way that the backtracking after subsequent failure was
5511 pessimal. Something like (a){0,3} was compiled as (a)?(a)?(a)? instead of
5512 ((a)((a)(a)?)?)? with disastrous performance if the maximum was of any size.
5515 Version 2.03 02-Feb-99
5516 ----------------------
5518 1. Fixed typo and small mistake in man page.
5520 2. Added 4th condition (GPL supersedes if conflict) and created separate
5521 LICENCE file containing the conditions.
5523 3. Updated pcretest so that patterns such as /abc\/def/ work like they do in
5524 Perl, that is the internal \ allows the delimiter to be included in the
5525 pattern. Locked out the use of \ as a delimiter. If \ immediately follows
5526 the final delimiter, add \ to the end of the pattern (to test the error).
5528 4. Added the convenience functions for extracting substrings after a successful
5529 match. Updated pcretest to make it able to test these functions.
5532 Version 2.02 14-Jan-99
5533 ----------------------
5535 1. Initialized the working variables associated with each extraction so that
5536 their saving and restoring doesn't refer to uninitialized store.
5538 2. Put dummy code into study.c in order to trick the optimizer of the IBM C
5539 compiler for OS/2 into generating correct code. Apparently IBM isn't going to
5542 3. Pcretest: the timing code wasn't using LOOPREPEAT for timing execution
5543 calls, and wasn't printing the correct value for compiling calls. Increased the
5544 default value of LOOPREPEAT, and the number of significant figures in the
5547 4. Changed "/bin/rm" in the Makefile to "-rm" so it works on Windows NT.
5549 5. Renamed "deftables" as "dftables" to get it down to 8 characters, to avoid
5550 a building problem on Windows NT with a FAT file system.
5553 Version 2.01 21-Oct-98
5554 ----------------------
5556 1. Changed the API for pcre_compile() to allow for the provision of a pointer
5557 to character tables built by pcre_maketables() in the current locale. If NULL
5558 is passed, the default tables are used.
5561 Version 2.00 24-Sep-98
5562 ----------------------
5564 1. Since the (>?) facility is in Perl 5.005, don't require PCRE_EXTRA to enable
5567 2. Allow quantification of (?>) groups, and make it work correctly.
5569 3. The first character computation wasn't working for (?>) groups.
5571 4. Correct the implementation of \Z (it is permitted to match on the \n at the
5572 end of the subject) and add 5.005's \z, which really does match only at the
5573 very end of the subject.
5575 5. Remove the \X "cut" facility; Perl doesn't have it, and (?> is neater.
5577 6. Remove the ability to specify CASELESS, MULTILINE, DOTALL, and
5578 DOLLAR_END_ONLY at runtime, to make it possible to implement the Perl 5.005
5579 localized options. All options to pcre_study() were also removed.
5581 7. Add other new features from 5.005:
5583 $(?<= positive lookbehind
5584 $(?<! negative lookbehind
5585 (?imsx-imsx) added the unsetting capability
5586 such a setting is global if at outer level; local otherwise
5587 (?imsx-imsx:) non-capturing groups with option setting
5588 (?(cond)re|re) conditional pattern matching
5590 A backreference to itself in a repeated group matches the previous
5593 8. General tidying up of studying (both automatic and via "study")
5594 consequential on the addition of new assertions.
5596 9. As in 5.005, unlimited repeated groups that could match an empty substring
5597 are no longer faulted at compile time. Instead, the loop is forcibly broken at
5598 runtime if any iteration does actually match an empty substring.
5600 10. Include the RunTest script in the distribution.
5602 11. Added tests from the Perl 5.005_02 distribution. This showed up a few
5603 discrepancies, some of which were old and were also with respect to 5.004. They
5604 have now been fixed.
5607 Version 1.09 28-Apr-98
5608 ----------------------
5610 1. A negated single character class followed by a quantifier with a minimum
5611 value of one (e.g. [^x]{1,6} ) was not compiled correctly. This could lead to
5612 program crashes, or just wrong answers. This did not apply to negated classes
5613 containing more than one character, or to minima other than one.
5616 Version 1.08 27-Mar-98
5617 ----------------------
5619 1. Add PCRE_UNGREEDY to invert the greediness of quantifiers.
5621 2. Add (?U) and (?X) to set PCRE_UNGREEDY and PCRE_EXTRA respectively. The
5622 latter must appear before anything that relies on it in the pattern.
5625 Version 1.07 16-Feb-98
5626 ----------------------
5628 1. A pattern such as /((a)*)*/ was not being diagnosed as in error (unlimited
5629 repeat of a potentially empty string).
5632 Version 1.06 23-Jan-98
5633 ----------------------
5635 1. Added Markus Oberhumer's little patches for C++.
5637 2. Literal strings longer than 255 characters were broken.
5640 Version 1.05 23-Dec-97
5641 ----------------------
5643 1. Negated character classes containing more than one character were failing if
5644 PCRE_CASELESS was set at run time.
5647 Version 1.04 19-Dec-97
5648 ----------------------
5650 1. Corrected the man page, where some "const" qualifiers had been omitted.
5652 2. Made debugging output print "{0,xxx}" instead of just "{,xxx}" to agree with
5655 3. Fixed memory leak which occurred when a regex with back references was
5656 matched with an offsets vector that wasn't big enough. The temporary memory
5657 that is used in this case wasn't being freed if the match failed.
5659 4. Tidied pcretest to ensure it frees memory that it gets.
5661 5. Temporary memory was being obtained in the case where the passed offsets
5662 vector was exactly big enough.
5664 6. Corrected definition of offsetof() from change 5 below.
5666 7. I had screwed up change 6 below and broken the rules for the use of
5667 setjmp(). Now fixed.
5670 Version 1.03 18-Dec-97
5671 ----------------------
5673 1. A erroneous regex with a missing opening parenthesis was correctly
5674 diagnosed, but PCRE attempted to access brastack[-1], which could cause crashes
5677 2. Replaced offsetof(real_pcre, code) by offsetof(real_pcre, code[0]) because
5678 it was reported that one broken compiler failed on the former because "code" is
5679 also an independent variable.
5681 3. The erroneous regex a[]b caused an array overrun reference.
5683 4. A regex ending with a one-character negative class (e.g. /[^k]$/) did not
5684 fail on data ending with that character. (It was going on too far, and checking
5685 the next character, typically a binary zero.) This was specific to the
5686 optimized code for single-character negative classes.
5688 5. Added a contributed patch from the TIN world which does the following:
5690 + Add an undef for memmove, in case the the system defines a macro for it.
5692 + Add a definition of offsetof(), in case there isn't one. (I don't know
5693 the reason behind this - offsetof() is part of the ANSI standard - but
5696 + Reduce the ifdef's in pcre.c using macro DPRINTF, thereby eliminating
5697 most of the places where whitespace preceded '#'. I have given up and
5698 allowed the remaining 2 cases to be at the margin.
5700 + Rename some variables in pcre to eliminate shadowing. This seems very
5701 pedantic, but does no harm, of course.
5703 6. Moved the call to setjmp() into its own function, to get rid of warnings
5704 from gcc -Wall, and avoided calling it at all unless PCRE_EXTRA is used.
5706 7. Constructs such as \d{8,} were compiling into the equivalent of
5707 \d{8}\d{0,65527} instead of \d{8}\d* which didn't make much difference to the
5708 outcome, but in this particular case used more store than had been allocated,
5709 which caused the bug to be discovered because it threw up an internal error.
5711 8. The debugging code in both pcre and pcretest for outputting the compiled
5712 form of a regex was going wrong in the case of back references followed by
5713 curly-bracketed repeats.
5716 Version 1.02 12-Dec-97
5717 ----------------------
5719 1. Typos in pcre.3 and comments in the source fixed.
5721 2. Applied a contributed patch to get rid of places where it used to remove
5722 'const' from variables, and fixed some signed/unsigned and uninitialized
5725 3. Added the "runtest" target to Makefile.
5727 4. Set default compiler flag to -O2 rather than just -O.
5730 Version 1.01 19-Nov-97
5731 ----------------------
5733 1. PCRE was failing to diagnose unlimited repeat of empty string for patterns
5734 like /([ab]*)*/, that is, for classes with more than one character in them.
5736 2. Likewise, it wasn't diagnosing patterns with "once-only" subpatterns, such
5737 as /((?>a*))*/ (a PCRE_EXTRA facility).
5740 Version 1.00 18-Nov-97
5741 ----------------------
5743 1. Added compile-time macros to support systems such as SunOS4 which don't have
5744 memmove() or strerror() but have other things that can be used instead.
5746 2. Arranged that "make clean" removes the executables.
5749 Version 0.99 27-Oct-97
5750 ----------------------
5752 1. Fixed bug in code for optimizing classes with only one character. It was
5753 initializing a 32-byte map regardless, which could cause it to run off the end
5754 of the memory it had got.
5756 2. Added, conditional on PCRE_EXTRA, the proposed (?>REGEX) construction.
5759 Version 0.98 22-Oct-97
5760 ----------------------
5762 1. Fixed bug in code for handling temporary memory usage when there are more
5763 back references than supplied space in the ovector. This could cause segfaults.
5766 Version 0.97 21-Oct-97
5767 ----------------------
5769 1. Added the \X "cut" facility, conditional on PCRE_EXTRA.
5771 2. Optimized negated single characters not to use a bit map.
5773 3. Brought error texts together as macro definitions; clarified some of them;
5774 fixed one that was wrong - it said "range out of order" when it meant "invalid
5777 4. Changed some char * arguments to const char *.
5779 5. Added PCRE_NOTBOL and PCRE_NOTEOL (from POSIX).
5781 6. Added the POSIX-style API wrapper in pcreposix.a and testing facilities in
5785 Version 0.96 16-Oct-97
5786 ----------------------
5788 1. Added a simple "pgrep" utility to the distribution.
5790 2. Fixed an incompatibility with Perl: "{" is now treated as a normal character
5791 unless it appears in one of the precise forms "{ddd}", "{ddd,}", or "{ddd,ddd}"
5792 where "ddd" means "one or more decimal digits".
5794 3. Fixed serious bug. If a pattern had a back reference, but the call to
5795 pcre_exec() didn't supply a large enough ovector to record the related
5796 identifying subpattern, the match always failed. PCRE now remembers the number
5797 of the largest back reference, and gets some temporary memory in which to save
5798 the offsets during matching if necessary, in order to ensure that
5799 backreferences always work.
5801 4. Increased the compatibility with Perl in a number of ways:
5803 (a) . no longer matches \n by default; an option PCRE_DOTALL is provided
5804 to request this handling. The option can be set at compile or exec time.
5806 (b) $ matches before a terminating newline by default; an option
5807 PCRE_DOLLAR_ENDONLY is provided to override this (but not in multiline
5808 mode). The option can be set at compile or exec time.
5810 (c) The handling of \ followed by a digit other than 0 is now supposed to be
5811 the same as Perl's. If the decimal number it represents is less than 10
5812 or there aren't that many previous left capturing parentheses, an octal
5813 escape is read. Inside a character class, it's always an octal escape,
5814 even if it is a single digit.
5816 (d) An escaped but undefined alphabetic character is taken as a literal,
5817 unless PCRE_EXTRA is set. Currently this just reserves the remaining
5820 (e) {0} is now permitted. (The previous item is removed from the compiled
5823 5. Changed all the names of code files so that the basic parts are no longer
5824 than 10 characters, and abolished the teeny "globals.c" file.
5826 6. Changed the handling of character classes; they are now done with a 32-byte
5829 7. Added the -d and /D options to pcretest to make it possible to look at the
5830 internals of compilation without having to recompile pcre.
5833 Version 0.95 23-Sep-97
5834 ----------------------
5836 1. Fixed bug in pre-pass concerning escaped "normal" characters such as \x5c or
5837 \x20 at the start of a run of normal characters. These were being treated as
5838 real characters, instead of the source characters being re-checked.
5841 Version 0.94 18-Sep-97
5842 ----------------------
5844 1. The functions are now thread-safe, with the caveat that the global variables
5845 containing pointers to malloc() and free() or alternative functions are the
5846 same for all threads.
5848 2. Get pcre_study() to generate a bitmap of initial characters for non-
5849 anchored patterns when this is possible, and use it if passed to pcre_exec().
5852 Version 0.93 15-Sep-97
5853 ----------------------
5855 1. /(b)|(:+)/ was computing an incorrect first character.
5857 2. Add pcre_study() to the API and the passing of pcre_extra to pcre_exec(),
5858 but not actually doing anything yet.
5860 3. Treat "-" characters in classes that cannot be part of ranges as literals,
5861 as Perl does (e.g. [-az] or [az-]).
5863 4. Set the anchored flag if a branch starts with .* or .*? because that tests
5864 all possible positions.
5866 5. Split up into different modules to avoid including unneeded functions in a
5867 compiled binary. However, compile and exec are still in one module. The "study"
5868 function is split off.
5870 6. The character tables are now in a separate module whose source is generated
5871 by an auxiliary program - but can then be edited by hand if required. There are
5872 now no calls to isalnum(), isspace(), isdigit(), isxdigit(), tolower() or
5873 toupper() in the code.
5875 7. Turn the malloc/free funtions variables into pcre_malloc and pcre_free and
5876 make them global. Abolish the function for setting them, as the caller can now
5880 Version 0.92 11-Sep-97
5881 ----------------------
5883 1. A repeat with a fixed maximum and a minimum of 1 for an ordinary character
5884 (e.g. /a{1,3}/) was broken (I mis-optimized it).
5886 2. Caseless matching was not working in character classes if the characters in
5887 the pattern were in upper case.
5889 3. Make ranges like [W-c] work in the same way as Perl for caseless matching.
5891 4. Make PCRE_ANCHORED public and accept as a compile option.
5893 5. Add an options word to pcre_exec() and accept PCRE_ANCHORED and
5894 PCRE_CASELESS at run time. Add escapes \A and \I to pcretest to cause it to
5897 6. Give an error if bad option bits passed at compile or run time.
5899 7. Add PCRE_MULTILINE at compile and exec time, and (?m) as well. Add \M to
5900 pcretest to cause it to pass that flag.
5902 8. Add pcre_info(), to get the number of identifying subpatterns, the stored
5903 options, and the first character, if set.
5905 9. Recognize C+ or C{n,m} where n >= 1 as providing a fixed starting character.
5908 Version 0.91 10-Sep-97
5909 ----------------------
5911 1. PCRE was failing to diagnose unlimited repeats of subpatterns that could
5912 match the empty string as in /(a*)*/. It was looping and ultimately crashing.
5914 2. PCRE was looping on encountering an indefinitely repeated back reference to
5915 a subpattern that had matched an empty string, e.g. /(a|)\1*/. It now does what
5916 Perl does - treats the match as successful.
~ian / pcre3.git / blob