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Diffstat (limited to 'external-libs/pcre/doc/perltest.txt')
-rw-r--r-- | external-libs/pcre/doc/perltest.txt | 34 |
1 files changed, 34 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/external-libs/pcre/doc/perltest.txt b/external-libs/pcre/doc/perltest.txt new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9ea9d932 --- /dev/null +++ b/external-libs/pcre/doc/perltest.txt @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +The perltest program +-------------------- + +The perltest program tests Perl's regular expressions; it has the same +specification as pcretest, and so can be given identical input, except that +input patterns can be followed only by Perl's lower case modifiers and /+ (as +used by pcretest), which is recognized and handled by the program. + +The data lines are processed as Perl double-quoted strings, so if they contain +" \ $ or @ characters, these have to be escaped. For this reason, all such +characters in testinput1 and testinput3 are escaped so that they can be used +for perltest as well as for pcretest, and the special upper case modifiers such +as /A that pcretest recognizes are not used in these files. The output should +be identical, apart from the initial identifying banner. + +The perltest script can also test UTF-8 features. It works as is for Perl 5.8 +or higher. It recognizes the special modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke +UTF-8 functionality. The testinput5 file can be fed to perltest to run UTF-8 +tests. + +For Perl 5.6, perltest won't work unmodified for the UTF-8 tests. You need to +uncomment the "use utf8" lines that it contains. It is best to do this on a +copy of the script, because for non-UTF-8 tests, these lines should remain +commented out. + +The testinput2 and testinput4 files are not suitable for feeding to perltest, +since they do make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that +pcretest uses to test some features of PCRE. The first of these files also +contains malformed regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses +them correctly. Similarly, testinput6 tests UTF-8 features that do not relate +to Perl. + +Philip Hazel <ph10@cam.ac.uk> +August 2002 |