32 lines
1.6 KiB
Text
32 lines
1.6 KiB
Text
The perltest program
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The perltest.pl script 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, testinput4, testinput6, and testinput11 are escaped
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so that they can be used for perltest as well as for pcretest. The special
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upper case pattern modifiers such as /A that pcretest recognizes, and its
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special data line escapes, are not used in these files. The output should be
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identical, apart from the initial identifying banner.
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The perltest.pl script can also test UTF-8 features. It recognizes the special
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modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke UTF-8 functionality. The testinput4
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and testinput6 files can be fed to perltest to run compatible UTF-8 tests.
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However, it is necessary to add "use utf8;" to the script to make this work
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correctly.
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The testinput11 file contains tests that use features of Perl 5.10, so does not
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work with Perl 5.8.
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The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest.pl, since
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they make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that pcretest
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uses to test some features of PCRE. Some of these files also contains malformed
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regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses them correctly.
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Philip Hazel
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October 2009
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