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  1. News about PCRE releases
  2. ------------------------
  3. Release 8.38 23-November-2015
  4. -----------------------------
  5. This is bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is now being
  6. maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to use the new PCRE2
  7. libraries.
  8. Release 8.37 28-April-2015
  9. --------------------------
  10. This is bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is now being
  11. maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to use the new PCRE2
  12. libraries.
  13. Release 8.36 26-September-2014
  14. ------------------------------
  15. This is primarily a bug-fix release. However, in addition, the Unicode data
  16. tables have been updated to Unicode 7.0.0.
  17. Release 8.35 04-April-2014
  18. --------------------------
  19. There have been performance improvements for classes containing non-ASCII
  20. characters and the "auto-possessification" feature has been extended. Other
  21. minor improvements have been implemented and bugs fixed. There is a new callout
  22. feature to enable applications to do detailed stack checks at compile time, to
  23. avoid running out of stack for deeply nested parentheses. The JIT compiler has
  24. been extended with experimental support for ARM-64, MIPS-64, and PPC-LE.
  25. Release 8.34 15-December-2013
  26. -----------------------------
  27. As well as fixing the inevitable bugs, performance has been improved by
  28. refactoring and extending the amount of "auto-possessification" that PCRE does.
  29. Other notable changes:
  30. . Implemented PCRE_INFO_MATCH_EMPTY, which yields 1 if the pattern can match
  31. an empty string. If it can, pcretest shows this in its information output.
  32. . A back reference to a named subpattern when there is more than one of the
  33. same name now checks them in the order in which they appear in the pattern.
  34. The first one that is set is used for the reference. Previously only the
  35. first one was inspected. This change makes PCRE more compatible with Perl.
  36. . Unicode character properties were updated from Unicode 6.3.0.
  37. . The character VT has been added to the set of characters that match \s and
  38. are generally treated as white space, following this same change in Perl
  39. 5.18. There is now no difference between "Perl space" and "POSIX space".
  40. . Perl has changed its handling of \8 and \9. If there is no previously
  41. encountered capturing group of those numbers, they are treated as the
  42. literal characters 8 and 9 instead of a binary zero followed by the
  43. literals. PCRE now does the same.
  44. . Following Perl, added \o{} to specify codepoints in octal, making it
  45. possible to specify values greater than 0777 and also making them
  46. unambiguous.
  47. . In UCP mode, \s was not matching two of the characters that Perl matches,
  48. namely NEL (U+0085) and MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR (U+180E), though they
  49. were matched by \h.
  50. . Add JIT support for the 64 bit TileGX architecture.
  51. . Upgraded the handling of the POSIX classes [:graph:], [:print:], and
  52. [:punct:] when PCRE_UCP is set so as to include the same characters as Perl
  53. does in Unicode mode.
  54. . Perl no longer allows group names to start with digits, so I have made this
  55. change also in PCRE.
  56. . Added support for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] as used in the BSD POSIX library to
  57. mean "start of word" and "end of word", respectively, as a transition aid.
  58. Release 8.33 28-May-2013
  59. --------------------------
  60. A number of bugs are fixed, and some performance improvements have been made.
  61. There are also some new features, of which these are the most important:
  62. . The behaviour of the backtracking verbs has been rationalized and
  63. documented in more detail.
  64. . JIT now supports callouts and all of the backtracking verbs.
  65. . Unicode validation has been updated in the light of Unicode Corrigendum #9,
  66. which points out that "non characters" are not "characters that may not
  67. appear in Unicode strings" but rather "characters that are reserved for
  68. internal use and have only local meaning".
  69. . (*LIMIT_MATCH=d) and (*LIMIT_RECURSION=d) have been added so that the
  70. creator of a pattern can specify lower (but not higher) limits for the
  71. matching process.
  72. . The PCRE_NEVER_UTF option is available to prevent pattern-writers from using
  73. the (*UTF) feature, as this could be a security issue.
  74. Release 8.32 30-November-2012
  75. -----------------------------
  76. This release fixes a number of bugs, but also has some new features. These are
  77. the highlights:
  78. . There is now support for 32-bit character strings and UTF-32. Like the
  79. 16-bit support, this is done by compiling a separate 32-bit library.
  80. . \X now matches a Unicode extended grapheme cluster.
  81. . Case-independent matching of Unicode characters that have more than one
  82. "other case" now makes all three (or more) characters equivalent. This
  83. applies, for example, to Greek Sigma, which has two lowercase versions.
  84. . Unicode character properties are updated to Unicode 6.2.0.
  85. . The EBCDIC support, which had decayed, has had a spring clean.
  86. . A number of JIT optimizations have been added, which give faster JIT
  87. execution speed. In addition, a new direct interface to JIT execution is
  88. available. This bypasses some of the sanity checks of pcre_exec() to give a
  89. noticeable speed-up.
  90. . A number of issues in pcregrep have been fixed, making it more compatible
  91. with GNU grep. In particular, --exclude and --include (and variants) apply
  92. to all files now, not just those obtained from scanning a directory
  93. recursively. In Windows environments, the default action for directories is
  94. now "skip" instead of "read" (which provokes an error).
  95. . If the --only-matching (-o) option in pcregrep is specified multiple
  96. times, each one causes appropriate output. For example, -o1 -o2 outputs the
  97. substrings matched by the 1st and 2nd capturing parentheses. A separating
  98. string can be specified by --om-separator (default empty).
  99. . When PCRE is built via Autotools using a version of gcc that has the
  100. "visibility" feature, it is used to hide internal library functions that are
  101. not part of the public API.
  102. Release 8.31 06-July-2012
  103. -------------------------
  104. This is mainly a bug-fixing release, with a small number of developments:
  105. . The JIT compiler now supports partial matching and the (*MARK) and
  106. (*COMMIT) verbs.
  107. . PCRE_INFO_MAXLOOKBEHIND can be used to find the longest lookbehind in a
  108. pattern.
  109. . There should be a performance improvement when using the heap instead of the
  110. stack for recursion.
  111. . pcregrep can now be linked with libedit as an alternative to libreadline.
  112. . pcregrep now has a --file-list option where the list of files to scan is
  113. given as a file.
  114. . pcregrep now recognizes binary files and there are related options.
  115. . The Unicode tables have been updated to 6.1.0.
  116. As always, the full list of changes is in the ChangeLog file.
  117. Release 8.30 04-February-2012
  118. -----------------------------
  119. Release 8.30 introduces a major new feature: support for 16-bit character
  120. strings, compiled as a separate library. There are a few changes to the
  121. 8-bit library, in addition to some bug fixes.
  122. . The pcre_info() function, which has been obsolete for over 10 years, has
  123. been removed.
  124. . When a compiled pattern was saved to a file and later reloaded on a host
  125. with different endianness, PCRE used automatically to swap the bytes in some
  126. of the data fields. With the advent of the 16-bit library, where more of this
  127. swapping is needed, it is no longer done automatically. Instead, the bad
  128. endianness is detected and a specific error is given. The user can then call
  129. a new function called pcre_pattern_to_host_byte_order() (or an equivalent
  130. 16-bit function) to do the swap.
  131. . In UTF-8 mode, the values 0xd800 to 0xdfff are not legal Unicode
  132. code points and are now faulted. (They are the so-called "surrogates"
  133. that are reserved for coding high values in UTF-16.)
  134. Release 8.21 12-Dec-2011
  135. ------------------------
  136. This is almost entirely a bug-fix release. The only new feature is the ability
  137. to obtain the size of the memory used by the JIT compiler.
  138. Release 8.20 21-Oct-2011
  139. ------------------------
  140. The main change in this release is the inclusion of Zoltan Herczeg's
  141. just-in-time compiler support, which can be accessed by building PCRE with
  142. --enable-jit. Large performance benefits can be had in many situations. 8.20
  143. also fixes an unfortunate bug that was introduced in 8.13 as well as tidying up
  144. a number of infelicities and differences from Perl.
  145. Release 8.13 16-Aug-2011
  146. ------------------------
  147. This is mainly a bug-fix release. There has been a lot of internal refactoring.
  148. The Unicode tables have been updated. The only new feature in the library is
  149. the passing of *MARK information to callouts. Some additions have been made to
  150. pcretest to make testing easier and more comprehensive. There is a new option
  151. for pcregrep to adjust its internal buffer size.
  152. Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011
  153. ------------------------
  154. This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail
  155. on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library.
  156. Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010
  157. ------------------------
  158. A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see
  159. ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes:
  160. . Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep.
  161. . Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options
  162. of pcregrep.
  163. . Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and
  164. \B.
  165. . Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a
  166. bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD.
  167. . Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_
  168. START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time
  169. Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010
  170. ------------------------
  171. There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option
  172. PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their
  173. opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number
  174. of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option,
  175. --line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to
  176. pipes.
  177. Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010
  178. ------------------------
  179. Another bug-fix release.
  180. Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010
  181. ------------------------
  182. This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and
  183. infelicities in the build system have been fixed.
  184. Release 8.00 19-Oct-09
  185. ----------------------
  186. Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some
  187. enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been
  188. removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching
  189. process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a
  190. full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a
  191. lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have
  192. duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have
  193. different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes.
  194. The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate
  195. of change is not slowing down.
  196. Release 7.9 11-Apr-09
  197. ---------------------
  198. Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions.
  199. Release 7.8 05-Sep-08
  200. ---------------------
  201. More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property
  202. lookup.
  203. Release 7.7 07-May-08
  204. ---------------------
  205. This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new
  206. features.
  207. Release 7.6 28-Jan-08
  208. ---------------------
  209. The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a
  210. potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In
  211. addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date.
  212. Release 7.5 10-Jan-08
  213. ---------------------
  214. This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with
  215. libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been
  216. added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to
  217. pcregrep.
  218. Release 7.4 21-Sep-07
  219. ---------------------
  220. The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether
  221. \R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF.
  222. Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of
  223. relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation
  224. updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE
  225. has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file.
  226. Release 7.3 28-Aug-07
  227. ---------------------
  228. Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not:
  229. 1. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control
  230. verbs" such as (*PRUNE).
  231. 2. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more
  232. restrictive in the strings it accepts.
  233. 3. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a
  234. consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that
  235. has a limited repeat count.
  236. 4. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec()
  237. no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match
  238. fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern.
  239. This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred.
  240. 5. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of
  241. a pattern have been added.
  242. Release 7.2 19-Jun-07
  243. ---------------------
  244. WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be
  245. recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v,
  246. and \V).
  247. Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is
  248. wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function
  249. independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the
  250. functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries
  251. are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the
  252. pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and
  253. the basic pcre library.
  254. Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added:
  255. (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines.
  256. (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions.
  257. \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>.
  258. \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar
  259. matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string.
  260. (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative
  261. start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing
  262. parentheses number 1 in both cases.
  263. \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively.
  264. Release 7.1 24-Apr-07
  265. ---------------------
  266. There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of
  267. PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which
  268. recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks.
  269. A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a
  270. complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools
  271. support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling
  272. PCRE in a wide variety of environments.
  273. NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built,
  274. called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was
  275. included in a single dll.
  276. Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer
  277. compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character
  278. tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate
  279. the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the
  280. "configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a
  281. system that uses EBCDIC code.
  282. There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is
  283. not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling.
  284. Release 7.0 19-Dec-06
  285. ---------------------
  286. This release has a new major number because there have been some internal
  287. upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities,
  288. and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely
  289. to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance.
  290. Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If
  291. you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to
  292. re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are:
  293. 1. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds
  294. some more scripts.
  295. 2. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline
  296. sequence as a newline.
  297. 3. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit.
  298. 4. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include
  299. alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for
  300. recursion.
  301. 5. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a
  302. QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and
  303. assignment.
  304. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
  305. Release 6.7 04-Jul-06
  306. ---------------------
  307. The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for
  308. multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the
  309. library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing).
  310. Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been
  311. significantly reduced for certain subject strings.
  312. Release 6.5 01-Feb-06
  313. ---------------------
  314. Important changes in this release:
  315. 1. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep.
  316. 2. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the
  317. supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic",
  318. and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to
  319. the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that
  320. use \p or \P must be recompiled.
  321. 3. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all
  322. recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for
  323. example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because
  324. otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work.
  325. See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug
  326. fixes and tidies.
  327. Release 6.0 07-Jun-05
  328. ---------------------
  329. The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several
  330. major new pieces of functionality.
  331. A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA
  332. algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases,
  333. though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On
  334. the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works
  335. better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the
  336. differences.
  337. The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new
  338. pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides.
  339. The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built
  340. automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this
  341. interface.
  342. The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each
  343. function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static
  344. linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have
  345. their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They
  346. are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers.
  347. The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as
  348. multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the
  349. ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility
  350. programs.
  351. Release 5.0 13-Sep-04
  352. ---------------------
  353. The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more
  354. conventional "BSD" licence.
  355. In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes
  356. in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes
  357. are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The
  358. new features are:
  359. 1. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every
  360. item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position
  361. in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing.
  362. 2. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character
  363. tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used
  364. at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the
  365. default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled
  366. pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything
  367. special unless you are using custom tables.
  368. 3. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to
  369. request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the
  370. subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing
  371. an input field as it is being typed.
  372. 4. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which
  373. means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only
  374. the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this
  375. support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the
  376. size of the library dramatically.
  377. 5. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later.
  378. 6. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a
  379. different host with the opposite endianness.
  380. 7. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features.
  381. The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no
  382. longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This
  383. makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching
  384. possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a
  385. result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected.
  386. Release 4.5 01-Dec-03
  387. ---------------------
  388. Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features:
  389. 1. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive
  390. function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows
  391. things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks.
  392. 2. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to
  393. check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the
  394. latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET.
  395. 3. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code.
  396. Release 4.4 21-Aug-03
  397. ---------------------
  398. This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE
  399. checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress
  400. this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance.
  401. Releases 4.1 - 4.3
  402. ------------------
  403. Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a
  404. look at ChangeLog.
  405. Release 4.0 17-Feb-03
  406. ---------------------
  407. There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional
  408. functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new
  409. functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the
  410. documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file.
  411. 1. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes.
  412. 2. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java
  413. package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic
  414. grouping".
  415. 3. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position
  416. is at the start point of the match.
  417. 4. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides
  418. with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE
  419. is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to
  420. its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at
  421. appropriate points.
  422. 5. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really
  423. easy to get totally confused.
  424. 6. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to
  425. name a group.
  426. 7. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an
  427. option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode.
  428. 8. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages.
  429. These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate
  430. directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking
  431. between the pages has been installed.
  432. Release 3.5 15-Aug-01
  433. ---------------------
  434. 1. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf
  435. and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS
  436. supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure
  437. command if you want only one of them.
  438. 2. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is
  439. useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets
  440. relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so
  441. there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc.
  442. 3. Upgrades to pcregrep:
  443. (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep.
  444. (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase.
  445. (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories.
  446. (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file.
  447. 4. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure
  448. script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix
  449. systems, the value can be set in config.h.
  450. 5. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an
  451. absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and
  452. likewise updated the man page.
  453. 6. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed.
  454. The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit.
  455. Release 3.3 01-Aug-00
  456. ---------------------
  457. There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and
  458. experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented.
  459. Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release.
  460. Release 3.0 01-Feb-00
  461. ---------------------
  462. 1. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It
  463. builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script.
  464. 2. PCRE is built as a shared library by default.
  465. 3. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:].
  466. 5. There is an experimental recursion feature.
  467. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  468. IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00
  469. Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger
  470. ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace.
  471. The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support
  472. some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005.
  473. IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00
  474. Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the
  475. pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it
  476. possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current
  477. locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new argument
  478. should be passed as NULL.
  479. IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05
  480. Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made
  481. to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been
  482. added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the
  483. subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man
  484. page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all
  485. you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a
  486. value of zero. For example, change
  487. pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize)
  488. to
  489. pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize)
  490. ****