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+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