30 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
30 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
The perltest program
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The perltest program tests Perl's regular expressions; it has the same
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specification as pcretest, and so can be given identical input, except that
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input patterns can be followed only by Perl's lower case modifiers and /+ (as
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used by pcretest), which is recognized and handled by the program.
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The data lines are processed as Perl double-quoted strings, so if they contain
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" \ $ or @ characters, these have to be escaped. For this reason, all such
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characters in testinput1 and testinput3 are escaped so that they can be used
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for perltest as well as for pcretest, and the special upper case modifiers such
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as /A that pcretest recognizes are not used in these files. The output should
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be identical, apart from the initial identifying banner.
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For testing UTF-8 features, an alternative form of perltest, called perltest8,
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is supplied. This requires Perl 5.6 or higher. It recognizes the special
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modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke UTF-8 functionality. The testinput5
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file can be fed to perltest8.
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The testinput2 and testinput4 files are not suitable for feeding to perltest,
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since they do make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that
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pcretest uses to test some features of PCRE. The first of these files also
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contains malformed regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses
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them correctly. Similarly, testinput6 tests UTF-8 features that do not relate
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to Perl.
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Philip Hazel <ph10@cam.ac.uk>
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August 2000
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