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Diffstat (limited to 'NEWS')
| -rw-r--r-- | NEWS | 47 |
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@@ -1,6 +1,53 @@ 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 --------------------- |