Release 5.0 13-Sep-04
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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.
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