huschi.net

PCRE2COMPAT(3)             Library Functions Manual             PCRE2COMPAT(3)
NAME
       PCRE2 - Perl-compatible regular expressions (revised API)
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PCRE2 AND PERL
       This document describes the differences in the ways that PCRE2 and Perl
       handle regular expressions. The differences  described  here  are  with
       respect  to Perl versions 5.26, but as both Perl and PCRE2 are continu-
       ally changing, the information may sometimes be out of date.
       1. PCRE2 has only a subset of Perl's Unicode support. Details  of  what
       it does have are given in the pcre2unicode page.
       2.  Like  Perl, PCRE2 allows repeat quantifiers on parenthesized asser-
       tions, but they do not mean what you might think. For example, (?!a){3}
       does  not  assert  that  the next three characters are not "a". It just
       asserts that the next character is not "a" three times  (in  principle;
       PCRE2  optimizes this to run the assertion just once). Perl allows some
       repeat quantifiers on other  assertions,  for  example,  \b*  (but  not
       \b{3}), but these do not seem to have any use.
       3.  Capturing  subpatterns that occur inside negative lookaround asser-
       tions are counted, but their entries in the offsets vector are set only
       when  a  negative  assertion  is a condition that has a matching branch
       (that is, the condition is false).
       4. The following Perl escape sequences are not supported: \F,  \l,  \L,
       \u, \U, and \N when followed by a character name. \N on its own, match-
       ing a non-newline character, and \N{U+dd..}, matching  a  Unicode  code
       point,  are  supported.  The  escapes that modify the case of following
       letters are implemented by Perl's general string-handling and  are  not
       part of its pattern matching engine. If any of these are encountered by
       PCRE2, an error is generated by default. However, if the PCRE2_ALT_BSUX
       option is set, \U and \u are interpreted as ECMAScript interprets them.
       5. The Perl escape sequences \p, \P, and \X are supported only if PCRE2
       is built with Unicode support (the default). The properties that can be
       tested  with  \p  and \P are limited to the general category properties
       such as Lu and Nd, script names such as Greek or Han, and  the  derived
       properties Any and L&.  PCRE2 does support the Cs (surrogate) property,
       which Perl does not; the Perl documentation says  "Because  Perl  hides
       the need for the user to understand the internal representation of Uni-
       code characters, there is no need to implement the somewhat messy  con-
       cept of surrogates."
       6. PCRE2 supports the \Q...\E escape for quoting substrings. Characters
       in between are treated as literals. However, this is slightly different
       from  Perl  in  that  $  and  @ are also handled as literals inside the
       quotes. In Perl, they cause variable interpolation (but of course PCRE2
       does  not  have  variables).  Also, Perl does "double-quotish backslash
       interpolation" on any backslashes between \Q and \E which, its documen-
       tation  says, "may lead to confusing results". PCRE2 treats a backslash
       between \Q and \E just like any other  character.  Note  the  following
       examples:
           Pattern            PCRE2 matches     Perl matches
           \Qabc$xyz\E        abc$xyz           abc followed by the
                                                  contents of $xyz
           \Qabc\$xyz\E       abc\$xyz          abc\$xyz
           \Qabc\E\$\Qxyz\E   abc$xyz           abc$xyz
           \QA\B\E            A\B               A\B
           \Q\\E              \                 \\E
       The  \Q...\E  sequence  is recognized both inside and outside character
       classes.
       7.  Fairly  obviously,  PCRE2  does  not  support  the  (?{code})   and
       (??{code}) constructions. However, PCRE2 does have a "callout" feature,
       which allows an external function to be called during pattern matching.
       See the pcre2callout documentation for details.
       8.  Subroutine  calls (whether recursive or not) were treated as atomic
       groups up to PCRE2 release 10.23, but from release 10.30 this  changed,
       and backtracking into subroutine calls is now supported, as in Perl.
       9.  If  any  of the backtracking control verbs are used in a subpattern
       that is called as a subroutine  (whether  or  not  recursively),  their
       effect  is  confined to that subpattern; it does not extend to the sur-
       rounding pattern. This is not always the case in Perl.  In  particular,
       if  (*THEN)  is  present in a group that is called as a subroutine, its
       action is limited to that group, even if the group does not contain any
       |  characters.  Note that such subpatterns are processed as anchored at
       the point where they are tested.
       10. If a pattern contains more than one backtracking control verb,  the
       first  one  that  is backtracked onto acts. For example, in the pattern
       A(*COMMIT)B(*PRUNE)C a failure in B triggers (*COMMIT), but  a  failure
       in C triggers (*PRUNE). Perl's behaviour is more complex; in many cases
       it is the same as PCRE2, but there are cases where it differs.
       11. Most backtracking verbs in assertions have  their  normal  actions.
       They are not confined to the assertion.
       12.  There are some differences that are concerned with the settings of
       captured strings when part of  a  pattern  is  repeated.  For  example,
       matching  "aba"  against  the  pattern  /^(a(b)?)+$/  in Perl leaves $2
       unset, but in PCRE2 it is set to "b".
       13. PCRE2's handling of duplicate subpattern numbers and duplicate sub-
       pattern names is not as general as Perl's. This is a consequence of the
       fact the PCRE2 works internally just with numbers,  using  an  external
       table  to translate between numbers and names. In particular, a pattern
       such as (?|(?<a>A)|(?<b>B), where the two  capturing  parentheses  have
       the  same  number  but different names, is not supported, and causes an
       error at compile time. If it were allowed, it would not be possible  to
       distinguish  which  parentheses matched, because both names map to cap-
       turing subpattern number 1. To avoid this confusing situation, an error
       is given at compile time.
       14. Perl used to recognize comments in some places that PCRE2 does not,
       for example, between the ( and ? at the start of a subpattern.  If  the
       /x modifier is set, Perl allowed white space between ( and ? though the
       latest Perls give an error (for a while it was just deprecated).  There
       may still be some cases where Perl behaves differently.
       15.  Perl,  when  in warning mode, gives warnings for character classes
       such as [A-\d] or [a-[:digit:]]. It then treats the hyphens  as  liter-
       als. PCRE2 has no warning features, so it gives an error in these cases
       because they are almost certainly user mistakes.
       16. In PCRE2, the upper/lower case character properties Lu and  Ll  are
       not  affected when case-independent matching is specified. For example,
       \p{Lu} always matches an upper case letter. I think Perl has changed in
       this  respect; in the release at the time of writing (5.24), \p{Lu} and
       \p{Ll} match all letters, regardless of case, when case independence is
       specified.
       17.  PCRE2  provides  some  extensions  to  the Perl regular expression
       facilities.  Perl 5.10 includes new features that are  not  in  earlier
       versions  of  Perl,  some  of which (such as named parentheses) were in
       PCRE2 for some time before. This list is with respect to Perl 5.26:
       (a) Although lookbehind assertions in PCRE2  must  match  fixed  length
       strings,  each alternative branch of a lookbehind assertion can match a
       different length of string. Perl requires them all  to  have  the  same
       length.
       (b) From PCRE2 10.23, backreferences to groups of fixed length are sup-
       ported in lookbehinds, provided that there is no possibility of  refer-
       encing  a  non-unique  number or name. Perl does not support backrefer-
       ences in lookbehinds.
       (c) If PCRE2_DOLLAR_ENDONLY is set and PCRE2_MULTILINE is not set,  the
       $ meta-character matches only at the very end of the string.
       (d)  A  backslash  followed  by  a  letter  with  no special meaning is
       faulted. (Perl can be made to issue a warning.)
       (e) If PCRE2_UNGREEDY is set, the greediness of the repetition  quanti-
       fiers is inverted, that is, by default they are not greedy, but if fol-
       lowed by a question mark they are.
       (f) PCRE2_ANCHORED can be used at matching time to force a  pattern  to
       be tried only at the first matching position in the subject string.
       (g)     The     PCRE2_NOTBOL,    PCRE2_NOTEOL,    PCRE2_NOTEMPTY    and
       PCRE2_NOTEMPTY_ATSTART options have no Perl equivalents.
       (h) The \R escape sequence can be restricted to match only CR,  LF,  or
       CRLF by the PCRE2_BSR_ANYCRLF option.
       (i)  The  callout  facility is PCRE2-specific. Perl supports codeblocks
       and variable interpolation, but not general hooks on every match.
       (j) The partial matching facility is PCRE2-specific.
       (k) The alternative matching function (pcre2_dfa_match() matches  in  a
       different way and is not Perl-compatible.
       (l)  PCRE2 recognizes some special sequences such as (*CR) or (*NO_JIT)
       at the start of a pattern that  set  overall  options  that  cannot  be
       changed within the pattern.
       18.  The  Perl  /a modifier restricts /d numbers to pure ascii, and the
       /aa modifier restricts /i  case-insensitive  matching  to  pure  ascii,
       ignoring  Unicode  rules.  This  separation  cannot be represented with
       PCRE2_UCP.
       19. Perl has different limits than PCRE2. See the pcre2limit documenta-
       tion for details. Perl went with 5.10 from recursion to iteration keep-
       ing the intermediate matches on the heap, which is ~10% slower but does
       not  fall into any stack-overflow limit. PCRE2 made a similar change at
       release 10.30, and also has many build-time and  run-time  customizable
       limits.
AUTHOR
       Philip Hazel
       University Computing Service
       Cambridge, England.
REVISION
       Last updated: 28 July 2018
       Copyright (c) 1997-2018 University of Cambridge.
PCRE2 10.32                      28 July 2018                   PCRE2COMPAT(3)