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Editing: perltest.txt
The perltest program -------------------- The perltest.pl script tests Perl's regular expressions; it has the same specification as pcretest, and so can be given identical input, except that input patterns can be followed only by Perl's lower case modifiers and /+ (as used by pcretest), which is recognized and handled by the program. The data lines are processed as Perl double-quoted strings, so if they contain " $ or @ characters, these have to be escaped. For this reason, all such characters in testinput1, testinput4, testinput6, and testinput11 are escaped so that they can be used for perltest as well as for pcretest. The special upper case pattern modifiers such as /A that pcretest recognizes, and its special data line escapes, are not used in these files. The output should be identical, apart from the initial identifying banner. The perltest.pl script can also test UTF-8 features. It recognizes the special modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke UTF-8 functionality. The testinput4 and testinput6 files can be fed to perltest to run compatible UTF-8 tests. However, it is necessary to add "use utf8;" to the script to make this work correctly. The testinput11 file contains tests that use features of Perl 5.10, so does not work with Perl 5.8. The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest.pl, since they make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that pcretest uses to test some features of PCRE. Some of these files also contains malformed regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses them correctly. Philip Hazel October 2009
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