pcre_compile
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Name

PCRE — Perl-compatible regular expressions

Synopsis



#include <pcre.h>
pcre *pcre_compile( const char *  pattern,
  int   options,
  const char **  errptr,
  int *  erroffset,
  const unsigned char *  tableptr);

DESCRIPTION

This function compiles a regular expression into an internal form. It is the same as pcre_compile2(), except for the absence of the errorcodeptr argument. Its arguments are:

 pattern       A zero-terminated string containing the
                 regular expression to be compiled
 options       Zero or more option bits
 errptr        Where to put an error message
 erroffset     Offset in pattern where error was found
 tableptr      Pointer to character tables, or NULL to
                 use the built-in default

The option bits are:

 PCRE_ANCHORED         Force pattern anchoring
 PCRE_AUTO_CALLOUT     Compile automatic callouts
 PCRE_BSR_ANYCRLF      \R matches only CR, LF, or CRLF
 PCRE_BSR_UNICODE      \R matches all Unicode line endings
 PCRE_CASELESS         Do caseless matching
 PCRE_DOLLAR_ENDONLY   $ not to match newline at end
 PCRE_DOTALL           . matches anything including NL
 PCRE_DUPNAMES         Allow duplicate names for subpatterns
 PCRE_EXTENDED         Ignore whitespace and # comments
 PCRE_EXTRA            PCRE extra features
                         (not much use currently)
 PCRE_FIRSTLINE        Force matching to be before newline
 PCRE_MULTILINE        ^ and $ match newlines within data
 PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY      Recognize any Unicode newline sequence
 PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF  Recognize CR, LF, and CRLF as newline sequences
 PCRE_NEWLINE_CR       Set CR as the newline sequence
 PCRE_NEWLINE_CRLF     Set CRLF as the newline sequence
 PCRE_NEWLINE_LF       Set LF as the newline sequence
 PCRE_NO_AUTO_CAPTURE  Disable numbered capturing paren-
                         theses (named ones available)
 PCRE_UNGREEDY         Invert greediness of quantifiers
 PCRE_UTF8             Run in UTF-8 mode
 PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK    Do not check the pattern for UTF-8
                         validity (only relevant if
                         PCRE_UTF8 is set)

PCRE must be built with UTF-8 support in order to use PCRE_UTF8 and PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK.

The yield of the function is a pointer to a private data structure that contains the compiled pattern, or NULL if an error was detected. Note that compiling regular expressions with one version of PCRE for use with a different version is not guaranteed to work and may cause crashes.

There is a complete description of the PCRE native API in the pcreapi page and a description of the POSIX API in the pcreposix page.

COPYRIGHT

This manual page is taken from the PCRE library, which is distributed under the BSD license.
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