Compiling PCRE on non-Unix systems ---------------------------------- See below for comments on Cygwin or MinGW usage. If you want to compile PCRE for a non-Unix system, note that it consists entirely of code written in Standard C, and so should compile successfully on any machine with a Standard C compiler and library, using normal compiling commands to do the following: (1) Copy or rename the file config.in as config.h, and change the macros that define HAVE_STRERROR and HAVE_MEMMOVE to define them as 1 rather than 0. Unfortunately, because of the way Unix autoconf works, the default setting has to be 0. You may also want to make changes to other macros in config.h. In particular, if you want to force a specific value for newline, you can define the NEWLINE macro. The default is to use '\n', thereby using whatever value your compiler gives to '\n'. (2) Copy or rename the file pcre.in as pcre.h, and change the macro definitions for PCRE_MAJOR, PCRE_MINOR, and PCRE_DATE near its start to the values set in configure.in. (3) Compile dftables.c as a stand-alone program, and then run it with the standard output sent to chartables.c. This generates a set of standard character tables. (4) Compile maketables.c, get.c, study.c and pcre.c and link them all together into an object library in whichever form your system keeps such libraries. This is the pcre library (chartables.c is included by means of an #include directive). (5) Similarly, compile pcreposix.c and link it as the pcreposix library. (6) Compile the test program pcretest.c. This needs the functions in the pcre and pcreposix libraries when linking. (7) Run pcretest on the testinput files in the testdata directory, and check that the output matches the corresponding testoutput files. You must use the -i option when checking testinput2. Note that the supplied files are in Unix format, with just LF characters as line terminators. You may need to edit them to change this if your system uses a different convention. If you have a system without "configure" but where you can use a Makefile, edit Makefile.in to create Makefile, substituting suitable values for the variables at the head of the file. Some help in building a Win32 DLL of PCRE in GnuWin32 environments was contributed by Paul Sokolovsky. These environments are Mingw32 (http://www.xraylith.wisc.edu/~khan/software/gnu-win32/) and CygWin (http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/). Paul comments: For CygWin, set CFLAGS=-mno-cygwin, and do 'make dll'. You'll get pcre.dll (containing pcreposix also), libpcre.dll.a, and dynamically linked pgrep and pcretest. If you have /bin/sh, run RunTest (three main test go ok, locale not supported). Changes to do MinGW with autoconf 2.50 were supplied by Fred Cox , who comments as follows: If you are using the PCRE DLL, the normal Unix style configure && make && make check && make install should just work[*]. If you want to statically link against the .a file, you must define PCRE_STATIC before including pcre.h, otherwise the pcre_malloc and pcre_free exported functions will be declared __declspec(dllimport), with hilarious results. See the configure.in and pcretest.c for how it is done for the static test. Also, there will only be a libpcre.la, not a libpcreposix.la, as you would expect from the Unix version. The single DLL includes the pcreposix interface. [*] But note that the supplied test files are in Unix format, with just LF characters as line terminators. You will have to edit them to change to CR LF terminators. A script for building PCRE using Borland's C++ compiler for use with VPASCAL was contributed by Alexander Tokarev. It is called makevp.bat. These are some further comments about Win32 builds from Mark Evans. They were contributed before Fred Cox's changes were made, so it is possible that they may no longer be relevant. The documentation for Win32 builds is a bit shy. Under MSVC6 I followed their instructions to the letter, but there were still some things missing. (1) Must #define STATIC for entire project if linking statically. (I see no reason to use DLLs for code this compact.) This of course is a project setting in MSVC under Preprocessor. (2) Missing some #ifdefs relating to the function pointers pcre_malloc and pcre_free. See my solution below. (The stubs may not be mandatory but they made me feel better.) ========================= #ifdef _WIN32 #include void* malloc_stub(size_t N) { return malloc(N); } void free_stub(void* p) { free(p); } void *(*pcre_malloc)(size_t) = &malloc_stub; void (*pcre_free)(void *) = &free_stub; #else void *(*pcre_malloc)(size_t) = malloc; void (*pcre_free)(void *) = free; #endif ========================= ****