1News about PCRE releases 2------------------------ 3 4Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is no longer being maintained. New 5projects are advised to use the PCRE2 libraries. 6 7 8Release 8.45 15-June-2021 9----------------------------- 10 11This is the final PCRE1 release. A very few small issues have been fixed. 12 13 14Release 8.44 12-February-2020 15----------------------------- 16 17This is a bug-fix release. 18 19 20Release 8.43 23-February-2019 21----------------------------- 22 23This is a bug-fix release. 24 25 26Release 8.42 20-March-2018 27-------------------------- 28 29This is a bug-fix release. 30 31 32Release 8.41 13-June-2017 33------------------------- 34 35This is a bug-fix release. 36 37 38Release 8.40 11-January-2017 39---------------------------- 40 41This is a bug-fix release. 42 43 44Release 8.39 14-June-2016 45------------------------- 46 47Some appropriate PCRE2 JIT improvements have been retro-fitted to PCRE1. Apart 48from that, this is another bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called 49PCRE1) is now being maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to 50use the new PCRE2 libraries. 51 52 53Release 8.38 23-November-2015 54----------------------------- 55 56This is bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is now being 57maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to use the new PCRE2 58libraries. 59 60 61Release 8.37 28-April-2015 62-------------------------- 63 64This is bug-fix release. Note that this library (now called PCRE1) is now being 65maintained for bug fixes only. New projects are advised to use the new PCRE2 66libraries. 67 68 69Release 8.36 26-September-2014 70------------------------------ 71 72This is primarily a bug-fix release. However, in addition, the Unicode data 73tables have been updated to Unicode 7.0.0. 74 75 76Release 8.35 04-April-2014 77-------------------------- 78 79There have been performance improvements for classes containing non-ASCII 80characters and the "auto-possessification" feature has been extended. Other 81minor improvements have been implemented and bugs fixed. There is a new callout 82feature to enable applications to do detailed stack checks at compile time, to 83avoid running out of stack for deeply nested parentheses. The JIT compiler has 84been extended with experimental support for ARM-64, MIPS-64, and PPC-LE. 85 86 87Release 8.34 15-December-2013 88----------------------------- 89 90As well as fixing the inevitable bugs, performance has been improved by 91refactoring and extending the amount of "auto-possessification" that PCRE does. 92Other notable changes: 93 94. Implemented PCRE_INFO_MATCH_EMPTY, which yields 1 if the pattern can match 95 an empty string. If it can, pcretest shows this in its information output. 96 97. A back reference to a named subpattern when there is more than one of the 98 same name now checks them in the order in which they appear in the pattern. 99 The first one that is set is used for the reference. Previously only the 100 first one was inspected. This change makes PCRE more compatible with Perl. 101 102. Unicode character properties were updated from Unicode 6.3.0. 103 104. The character VT has been added to the set of characters that match \s and 105 are generally treated as white space, following this same change in Perl 106 5.18. There is now no difference between "Perl space" and "POSIX space". 107 108. Perl has changed its handling of \8 and \9. If there is no previously 109 encountered capturing group of those numbers, they are treated as the 110 literal characters 8 and 9 instead of a binary zero followed by the 111 literals. PCRE now does the same. 112 113. Following Perl, added \o{} to specify codepoints in octal, making it 114 possible to specify values greater than 0777 and also making them 115 unambiguous. 116 117. In UCP mode, \s was not matching two of the characters that Perl matches, 118 namely NEL (U+0085) and MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR (U+180E), though they 119 were matched by \h. 120 121. Add JIT support for the 64 bit TileGX architecture. 122 123. Upgraded the handling of the POSIX classes [:graph:], [:print:], and 124 [:punct:] when PCRE_UCP is set so as to include the same characters as Perl 125 does in Unicode mode. 126 127. Perl no longer allows group names to start with digits, so I have made this 128 change also in PCRE. 129 130. Added support for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] as used in the BSD POSIX library to 131 mean "start of word" and "end of word", respectively, as a transition aid. 132 133 134Release 8.33 28-May-2013 135-------------------------- 136 137A number of bugs are fixed, and some performance improvements have been made. 138There are also some new features, of which these are the most important: 139 140. The behaviour of the backtracking verbs has been rationalized and 141 documented in more detail. 142 143. JIT now supports callouts and all of the backtracking verbs. 144 145. Unicode validation has been updated in the light of Unicode Corrigendum #9, 146 which points out that "non characters" are not "characters that may not 147 appear in Unicode strings" but rather "characters that are reserved for 148 internal use and have only local meaning". 149 150. (*LIMIT_MATCH=d) and (*LIMIT_RECURSION=d) have been added so that the 151 creator of a pattern can specify lower (but not higher) limits for the 152 matching process. 153 154. The PCRE_NEVER_UTF option is available to prevent pattern-writers from using 155 the (*UTF) feature, as this could be a security issue. 156 157 158Release 8.32 30-November-2012 159----------------------------- 160 161This release fixes a number of bugs, but also has some new features. These are 162the highlights: 163 164. There is now support for 32-bit character strings and UTF-32. Like the 165 16-bit support, this is done by compiling a separate 32-bit library. 166 167. \X now matches a Unicode extended grapheme cluster. 168 169. Case-independent matching of Unicode characters that have more than one 170 "other case" now makes all three (or more) characters equivalent. This 171 applies, for example, to Greek Sigma, which has two lowercase versions. 172 173. Unicode character properties are updated to Unicode 6.2.0. 174 175. The EBCDIC support, which had decayed, has had a spring clean. 176 177. A number of JIT optimizations have been added, which give faster JIT 178 execution speed. In addition, a new direct interface to JIT execution is 179 available. This bypasses some of the sanity checks of pcre_exec() to give a 180 noticeable speed-up. 181 182. A number of issues in pcregrep have been fixed, making it more compatible 183 with GNU grep. In particular, --exclude and --include (and variants) apply 184 to all files now, not just those obtained from scanning a directory 185 recursively. In Windows environments, the default action for directories is 186 now "skip" instead of "read" (which provokes an error). 187 188. If the --only-matching (-o) option in pcregrep is specified multiple 189 times, each one causes appropriate output. For example, -o1 -o2 outputs the 190 substrings matched by the 1st and 2nd capturing parentheses. A separating 191 string can be specified by --om-separator (default empty). 192 193. When PCRE is built via Autotools using a version of gcc that has the 194 "visibility" feature, it is used to hide internal library functions that are 195 not part of the public API. 196 197 198Release 8.31 06-July-2012 199------------------------- 200 201This is mainly a bug-fixing release, with a small number of developments: 202 203. The JIT compiler now supports partial matching and the (*MARK) and 204 (*COMMIT) verbs. 205 206. PCRE_INFO_MAXLOOKBEHIND can be used to find the longest lookbehind in a 207 pattern. 208 209. There should be a performance improvement when using the heap instead of the 210 stack for recursion. 211 212. pcregrep can now be linked with libedit as an alternative to libreadline. 213 214. pcregrep now has a --file-list option where the list of files to scan is 215 given as a file. 216 217. pcregrep now recognizes binary files and there are related options. 218 219. The Unicode tables have been updated to 6.1.0. 220 221As always, the full list of changes is in the ChangeLog file. 222 223 224Release 8.30 04-February-2012 225----------------------------- 226 227Release 8.30 introduces a major new feature: support for 16-bit character 228strings, compiled as a separate library. There are a few changes to the 2298-bit library, in addition to some bug fixes. 230 231. The pcre_info() function, which has been obsolete for over 10 years, has 232 been removed. 233 234. When a compiled pattern was saved to a file and later reloaded on a host 235 with different endianness, PCRE used automatically to swap the bytes in some 236 of the data fields. With the advent of the 16-bit library, where more of this 237 swapping is needed, it is no longer done automatically. Instead, the bad 238 endianness is detected and a specific error is given. The user can then call 239 a new function called pcre_pattern_to_host_byte_order() (or an equivalent 240 16-bit function) to do the swap. 241 242. In UTF-8 mode, the values 0xd800 to 0xdfff are not legal Unicode 243 code points and are now faulted. (They are the so-called "surrogates" 244 that are reserved for coding high values in UTF-16.) 245 246 247Release 8.21 12-Dec-2011 248------------------------ 249 250This is almost entirely a bug-fix release. The only new feature is the ability 251to obtain the size of the memory used by the JIT compiler. 252 253 254Release 8.20 21-Oct-2011 255------------------------ 256 257The main change in this release is the inclusion of Zoltan Herczeg's 258just-in-time compiler support, which can be accessed by building PCRE with 259--enable-jit. Large performance benefits can be had in many situations. 8.20 260also fixes an unfortunate bug that was introduced in 8.13 as well as tidying up 261a number of infelicities and differences from Perl. 262 263 264Release 8.13 16-Aug-2011 265------------------------ 266 267This is mainly a bug-fix release. There has been a lot of internal refactoring. 268The Unicode tables have been updated. The only new feature in the library is 269the passing of *MARK information to callouts. Some additions have been made to 270pcretest to make testing easier and more comprehensive. There is a new option 271for pcregrep to adjust its internal buffer size. 272 273 274Release 8.12 15-Jan-2011 275------------------------ 276 277This release fixes some bugs in pcregrep, one of which caused the tests to fail 278on 64-bit big-endian systems. There are no changes to the code of the library. 279 280 281Release 8.11 10-Dec-2010 282------------------------ 283 284A number of bugs in the library and in pcregrep have been fixed. As always, see 285ChangeLog for details. The following are the non-bug-fix changes: 286 287. Added --match-limit and --recursion-limit to pcregrep. 288 289. Added an optional parentheses number to the -o and --only-matching options 290 of pcregrep. 291 292. Changed the way PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD affects the matching of $, \z, \Z, \b, and 293 \B. 294 295. Added PCRE_ERROR_SHORTUTF8 to make it possible to distinguish between a 296 bad UTF-8 sequence and one that is incomplete when using PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD. 297 298. Recognize (*NO_START_OPT) at the start of a pattern to set the PCRE_NO_ 299 START_OPTIMIZE option, which is now allowed at compile time 300 301 302Release 8.10 25-Jun-2010 303------------------------ 304 305There are two major additions: support for (*MARK) and friends, and the option 306PCRE_UCP, which changes the behaviour of \b, \d, \s, and \w (and their 307opposites) so that they make use of Unicode properties. There are also a number 308of lesser new features, and several bugs have been fixed. A new option, 309--line-buffered, has been added to pcregrep, for use when it is connected to 310pipes. 311 312 313Release 8.02 19-Mar-2010 314------------------------ 315 316Another bug-fix release. 317 318 319Release 8.01 19-Jan-2010 320------------------------ 321 322This is a bug-fix release. Several bugs in the code itself and some bugs and 323infelicities in the build system have been fixed. 324 325 326Release 8.00 19-Oct-09 327---------------------- 328 329Bugs have been fixed in the library and in pcregrep. There are also some 330enhancements. Restrictions on patterns used for partial matching have been 331removed, extra information is given for partial matches, the partial matching 332process has been improved, and an option to make a partial match override a 333full match is available. The "study" process has been enhanced by finding a 334lower bound matching length. Groups with duplicate numbers may now have 335duplicated names without the use of PCRE_DUPNAMES. However, they may not have 336different names. The documentation has been revised to reflect these changes. 337The version number has been expanded to 3 digits as it is clear that the rate 338of change is not slowing down. 339 340 341Release 7.9 11-Apr-09 342--------------------- 343 344Mostly bugfixes and tidies with just a couple of minor functional additions. 345 346 347Release 7.8 05-Sep-08 348--------------------- 349 350More bug fixes, plus a performance improvement in Unicode character property 351lookup. 352 353 354Release 7.7 07-May-08 355--------------------- 356 357This is once again mainly a bug-fix release, but there are a couple of new 358features. 359 360 361Release 7.6 28-Jan-08 362--------------------- 363 364The main reason for having this release so soon after 7.5 is because it fixes a 365potential buffer overflow problem in pcre_compile() when run in UTF-8 mode. In 366addition, the CMake configuration files have been brought up to date. 367 368 369Release 7.5 10-Jan-08 370--------------------- 371 372This is mainly a bug-fix release. However the ability to link pcregrep with 373libz or libbz2 and the ability to link pcretest with libreadline have been 374added. Also the --line-offsets and --file-offsets options were added to 375pcregrep. 376 377 378Release 7.4 21-Sep-07 379--------------------- 380 381The only change of specification is the addition of options to control whether 382\R matches any Unicode line ending (the default) or just CR, LF, and CRLF. 383Otherwise, the changes are bug fixes and a refactoring to reduce the number of 384relocations needed in a shared library. There have also been some documentation 385updates, in particular, some more information about using CMake to build PCRE 386has been added to the NON-UNIX-USE file. 387 388 389Release 7.3 28-Aug-07 390--------------------- 391 392Most changes are bug fixes. Some that are not: 393 3941. There is some support for Perl 5.10's experimental "backtracking control 395 verbs" such as (*PRUNE). 396 3972. UTF-8 checking is now as per RFC 3629 instead of RFC 2279; this is more 398 restrictive in the strings it accepts. 399 4003. Checking for potential integer overflow has been made more dynamic, and as a 401 consequence there is no longer a hard limit on the size of a subpattern that 402 has a limited repeat count. 403 4044. When CRLF is a valid line-ending sequence, pcre_exec() and pcre_dfa_exec() 405 no longer advance by two characters instead of one when an unanchored match 406 fails at CRLF if there are explicit CR or LF matches within the pattern. 407 This gets rid of some anomalous effects that previously occurred. 408 4095. Some PCRE-specific settings for varying the newline options at the start of 410 a pattern have been added. 411 412 413Release 7.2 19-Jun-07 414--------------------- 415 416WARNING: saved patterns that were compiled by earlier versions of PCRE must be 417recompiled for use with 7.2 (necessitated by the addition of \K, \h, \H, \v, 418and \V). 419 420Correction to the notes for 7.1: the note about shared libraries for Windows is 421wrong. Previously, three libraries were built, but each could function 422independently. For example, the pcreposix library also included all the 423functions from the basic pcre library. The change is that the three libraries 424are no longer independent. They are like the Unix libraries. To use the 425pcreposix functions, for example, you need to link with both the pcreposix and 426the basic pcre library. 427 428Some more features from Perl 5.10 have been added: 429 430 (?-n) and (?+n) relative references for recursion and subroutines. 431 432 (?(-n) and (?(+n) relative references as conditions. 433 434 \k{name} and \g{name} are synonyms for \k<name>. 435 436 \K to reset the start of the matched string; for example, (foo)\Kbar 437 matches bar preceded by foo, but only sets bar as the matched string. 438 439 (?| introduces a group where the capturing parentheses in each alternative 440 start from the same number; for example, (?|(abc)|(xyz)) sets capturing 441 parentheses number 1 in both cases. 442 443 \h, \H, \v, \V match horizontal and vertical whitespace, respectively. 444 445 446Release 7.1 24-Apr-07 447--------------------- 448 449There is only one new feature in this release: a linebreak setting of 450PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF. It is a cut-down version of PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY, which 451recognizes only CRLF, CR, and LF as linebreaks. 452 453A few bugs are fixed (see ChangeLog for details), but the major change is a 454complete re-implementation of the build system. This now has full Autotools 455support and so is now "standard" in some sense. It should help with compiling 456PCRE in a wide variety of environments. 457 458NOTE: when building shared libraries for Windows, three dlls are now built, 459called libpcre, libpcreposix, and libpcrecpp. Previously, everything was 460included in a single dll. 461 462Another important change is that the dftables auxiliary program is no longer 463compiled and run at "make" time by default. Instead, a default set of character 464tables (assuming ASCII coding) is used. If you want to use dftables to generate 465the character tables as previously, add --enable-rebuild-chartables to the 466"configure" command. You must do this if you are compiling PCRE to run on a 467system that uses EBCDIC code. 468 469There is a discussion about character tables in the README file. The default is 470not to use dftables so that that there is no problem when cross-compiling. 471 472 473Release 7.0 19-Dec-06 474--------------------- 475 476This release has a new major number because there have been some internal 477upheavals to facilitate the addition of new optimizations and other facilities, 478and to make subsequent maintenance and extension easier. Compilation is likely 479to be a bit slower, but there should be no major effect on runtime performance. 480Previously compiled patterns are NOT upwards compatible with this release. If 481you have saved compiled patterns from a previous release, you will have to 482re-compile them. Important changes that are visible to users are: 483 4841. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 5.0.0, which adds 485 some more scripts. 486 4872. The option PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY causes PCRE to recognize any Unicode newline 488 sequence as a newline. 489 4903. The \R escape matches a single Unicode newline sequence as a single unit. 491 4924. New features that will appear in Perl 5.10 are now in PCRE. These include 493 alternative Perl syntax for named parentheses, and Perl syntax for 494 recursion. 495 4965. The C++ wrapper interface has been extended by the addition of a 497 QuoteMeta function and the ability to allow copy construction and 498 assignment. 499 500For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. 501 502 503Release 6.7 04-Jul-06 504--------------------- 505 506The main additions to this release are the ability to use the same name for 507multiple sets of parentheses, and support for CRLF line endings in both the 508library and pcregrep (and in pcretest for testing). 509 510Thanks to Ian Taylor, the stack usage for many kinds of pattern has been 511significantly reduced for certain subject strings. 512 513 514Release 6.5 01-Feb-06 515--------------------- 516 517Important changes in this release: 518 5191. A number of new features have been added to pcregrep. 520 5212. The Unicode property tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1.0, and the 522 supported properties have been extended with script names such as "Arabic", 523 and the derived properties "Any" and "L&". This has necessitated a change to 524 the interal format of compiled patterns. Any saved compiled patterns that 525 use \p or \P must be recompiled. 526 5273. The specification of recursion in patterns has been changed so that all 528 recursive subpatterns are automatically treated as atomic groups. Thus, for 529 example, (?R) is treated as if it were (?>(?R)). This is necessary because 530 otherwise there are situations where recursion does not work. 531 532See the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes, which include a number of bug 533fixes and tidies. 534 535 536Release 6.0 07-Jun-05 537--------------------- 538 539The release number has been increased to 6.0 because of the addition of several 540major new pieces of functionality. 541 542A new function, pcre_dfa_exec(), which implements pattern matching using a DFA 543algorithm, has been added. This has a number of advantages for certain cases, 544though it does run more slowly, and lacks the ability to capture substrings. On 545the other hand, it does find all matches, not just the first, and it works 546better for partial matching. The pcrematching man page discusses the 547differences. 548 549The pcretest program has been enhanced so that it can make use of the new 550pcre_dfa_exec() matching function and the extra features it provides. 551 552The distribution now includes a C++ wrapper library. This is built 553automatically if a C++ compiler is found. The pcrecpp man page discusses this 554interface. 555 556The code itself has been re-organized into many more files, one for each 557function, so it no longer requires everything to be linked in when static 558linkage is used. As a consequence, some internal functions have had to have 559their names exposed. These functions all have names starting with _pcre_. They 560are undocumented, and are not intended for use by outside callers. 561 562The pcregrep program has been enhanced with new functionality such as 563multiline-matching and options for output more matching context. See the 564ChangeLog for a complete list of changes to the library and the utility 565programs. 566 567 568Release 5.0 13-Sep-04 569--------------------- 570 571The licence under which PCRE is released has been changed to the more 572conventional "BSD" licence. 573 574In the code, some bugs have been fixed, and there are also some major changes 575in this release (which is why I've increased the number to 5.0). Some changes 576are internal rearrangements, and some provide a number of new facilities. The 577new features are: 578 5791. There's an "automatic callout" feature that inserts callouts before every 580 item in the regex, and there's a new callout field that gives the position 581 in the pattern - useful for debugging and tracing. 582 5832. The extra_data structure can now be used to pass in a set of character 584 tables at exec time. This is useful if compiled regex are saved and re-used 585 at a later time when the tables may not be at the same address. If the 586 default internal tables are used, the pointer saved with the compiled 587 pattern is now set to NULL, which means that you don't need to do anything 588 special unless you are using custom tables. 589 5903. It is possible, with some restrictions on the content of the regex, to 591 request "partial" matching. A special return code is given if all of the 592 subject string matched part of the regex. This could be useful for testing 593 an input field as it is being typed. 594 5954. There is now some optional support for Unicode character properties, which 596 means that the patterns items such as \p{Lu} and \X can now be used. Only 597 the general category properties are supported. If PCRE is compiled with this 598 support, an additional 90K data structure is include, which increases the 599 size of the library dramatically. 600 6015. There is support for saving compiled patterns and re-using them later. 602 6036. There is support for running regular expressions that were compiled on a 604 different host with the opposite endianness. 605 6067. The pcretest program has been extended to accommodate the new features. 607 608The main internal rearrangement is that sequences of literal characters are no 609longer handled as strings. Instead, each character is handled on its own. This 610makes some UTF-8 handling easier, and makes the support of partial matching 611possible. Compiled patterns containing long literal strings will be larger as a 612result of this change; I hope that performance will not be much affected. 613 614 615Release 4.5 01-Dec-03 616--------------------- 617 618Again mainly a bug-fix and tidying release, with only a couple of new features: 619 6201. It's possible now to compile PCRE so that it does not use recursive 621function calls when matching. Instead it gets memory from the heap. This slows 622things down, but may be necessary on systems with limited stacks. 623 6242. UTF-8 string checking has been tightened to reject overlong sequences and to 625check that a starting offset points to the start of a character. Failure of the 626latter returns a new error code: PCRE_ERROR_BADUTF8_OFFSET. 627 6283. PCRE can now be compiled for systems that use EBCDIC code. 629 630 631Release 4.4 21-Aug-03 632--------------------- 633 634This is mainly a bug-fix and tidying release. The only new feature is that PCRE 635checks UTF-8 strings for validity by default. There is an option to suppress 636this, just in case anybody wants that teeny extra bit of performance. 637 638 639Releases 4.1 - 4.3 640------------------ 641 642Sorry, I forgot about updating the NEWS file for these releases. Please take a 643look at ChangeLog. 644 645 646Release 4.0 17-Feb-03 647--------------------- 648 649There have been a lot of changes for the 4.0 release, adding additional 650functionality and mending bugs. Below is a list of the highlights of the new 651functionality. For full details of these features, please consult the 652documentation. For a complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file. 653 6541. Support for Perl's \Q...\E escapes. 655 6562. "Possessive quantifiers" ?+, *+, ++, and {,}+ which come from Sun's Java 657package. They provide some syntactic sugar for simple cases of "atomic 658grouping". 659 6603. Support for the \G assertion. It is true when the current matching position 661is at the start point of the match. 662 6634. A new feature that provides some of the functionality that Perl provides 664with (?{...}). The facility is termed a "callout". The way it is done in PCRE 665is for the caller to provide an optional function, by setting pcre_callout to 666its entry point. To get the function called, the regex must include (?C) at 667appropriate points. 668 6695. Support for recursive calls to individual subpatterns. This makes it really 670easy to get totally confused. 671 6726. Support for named subpatterns. The Python syntax (?P<name>...) is used to 673name a group. 674 6757. Several extensions to UTF-8 support; it is now fairly complete. There is an 676option for pcregrep to make it operate in UTF-8 mode. 677 6788. The single man page has been split into a number of separate man pages. 679These also give rise to individual HTML pages which are put in a separate 680directory. There is an index.html page that lists them all. Some hyperlinking 681between the pages has been installed. 682 683 684Release 3.5 15-Aug-01 685--------------------- 686 6871. The configuring system has been upgraded to use later versions of autoconf 688and libtool. By default it builds both a shared and a static library if the OS 689supports it. You can use --disable-shared or --disable-static on the configure 690command if you want only one of them. 691 6922. The pcretest utility is now installed along with pcregrep because it is 693useful for users (to test regexs) and by doing this, it automatically gets 694relinked by libtool. The documentation has been turned into a man page, so 695there are now .1, .txt, and .html versions in /doc. 696 6973. Upgrades to pcregrep: 698 (i) Added long-form option names like gnu grep. 699 (ii) Added --help to list all options with an explanatory phrase. 700 (iii) Added -r, --recursive to recurse into sub-directories. 701 (iv) Added -f, --file to read patterns from a file. 702 7034. Added --enable-newline-is-cr and --enable-newline-is-lf to the configure 704script, to force use of CR or LF instead of \n in the source. On non-Unix 705systems, the value can be set in config.h. 706 7075. The limit of 200 on non-capturing parentheses is a _nesting_ limit, not an 708absolute limit. Changed the text of the error message to make this clear, and 709likewise updated the man page. 710 7116. The limit of 99 on the number of capturing subpatterns has been removed. 712The new limit is 65535, which I hope will not be a "real" limit. 713 714 715Release 3.3 01-Aug-00 716--------------------- 717 718There is some support for UTF-8 character strings. This is incomplete and 719experimental. The documentation describes what is and what is not implemented. 720Otherwise, this is just a bug-fixing release. 721 722 723Release 3.0 01-Feb-00 724--------------------- 725 7261. A "configure" script is now used to configure PCRE for Unix systems. It 727builds a Makefile, a config.h file, and the pcre-config script. 728 7292. PCRE is built as a shared library by default. 730 7313. There is support for POSIX classes such as [:alpha:]. 732 7335. There is an experimental recursion feature. 734 735---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 736 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 2.00 737 738Please note that there has been a change in the API such that a larger 739ovector is required at matching time, to provide some additional workspace. 740The new man page has details. This change was necessary in order to support 741some of the new functionality in Perl 5.005. 742 743 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.00 744 745Another (I hope this is the last!) change has been made to the API for the 746pcre_compile() function. An additional argument has been added to make it 747possible to pass over a pointer to character tables built in the current 748locale by pcre_maketables(). To use the default tables, this new argument 749should be passed as NULL. 750 751 IMPORTANT FOR THOSE UPGRADING FROM VERSION 2.05 752 753Yet another (and again I hope this really is the last) change has been made 754to the API for the pcre_exec() function. An additional argument has been 755added to make it possible to start the match other than at the start of the 756subject string. This is important if there are lookbehinds. The new man 757page has the details, but you just want to convert existing programs, all 758you need to do is to stick in a new fifth argument to pcre_exec(), with a 759value of zero. For example, change 760 761 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, options, ovec, ovecsize) 762to 763 pcre_exec(pattern, extra, subject, length, 0, options, ovec, ovecsize) 764 765**** 766