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Diffstat (limited to 'srclib/pcre/NEWS')
| -rw-r--r-- | srclib/pcre/NEWS | 116 |
1 files changed, 116 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/srclib/pcre/NEWS b/srclib/pcre/NEWS index 27866b68a2..e9a5cf255e 100644 --- a/srclib/pcre/NEWS +++ b/srclib/pcre/NEWS @@ -1,6 +1,122 @@ News about PCRE releases ------------------------ +Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 +--------------------- + +The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more +conventional "BSD" licence. + +In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes +in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes +are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The +new features are: + +1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every + item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position + in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. + +2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character + tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used + at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the + default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled + pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything + special unless you are using custom tables. + +3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to + request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the + subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing + an input field as it is being typed. + +4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which + means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only + the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this + support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the + size of the library dramatically. + +5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. + +6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a + different host with the opposite endianness. + +7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. + +The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no +longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This +makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching +possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a +result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. + + +Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 +--------------------- + +Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features: + +1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive +function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows +things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks. + +2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to +check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the +latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET. + +3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code. + + +Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 +--------------------- + +This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE +checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress +this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance. + + +Releases 4.1 - 4.3 +------------------ + +Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a +look at ChangeLog. + + +Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 +--------------------- + +There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional +functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new +functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the +documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. + +1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. + +2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java +package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic +grouping". + +3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position +is at the start point of the match. + +4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides +with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE +is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to +its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at +appropriate points. + +5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really +easy to get totally confused. + +6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to +name a group. + +7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an +option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. + +8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. +These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate +directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking +between the pages has been installed. + + Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 --------------------- |