34 lines
1.6 KiB
Plaintext
34 lines
1.6 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 testinput4 are escaped so that they can be used
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for perltest as well as for pcretest. The special upper case pattern
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modifiers such as /A that pcretest recognizes, and its special data line
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escapes, are not used in these files. The output should be identical, apart
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from the initial identifying banner.
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The perltest script can also test UTF-8 features. It works as is for Perl 5.8
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or higher. It recognizes the special modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke
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UTF-8 functionality. The testinput4 file can be fed to perltest to run
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compatible UTF-8 tests.
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For Perl 5.6, perltest won't work unmodified for the UTF-8 tests. You need to
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uncomment the "use utf8" lines that it contains. It is best to do this on a
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copy of the script, because for non-UTF-8 tests, these lines should remain
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commented out.
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The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest, since they
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make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that pcretest uses to
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test some features of PCRE. Some of these files also contains malformed regular
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expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses them correctly.
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Philip Hazel
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September 2004
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