| The perltest program |
| -------------------- |
| |
| The perltest program 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 and testinput3 are escaped so that they can be used |
| for perltest as well as for pcretest, and the special upper case modifiers such |
| as /A that pcretest recognizes are not used in these files. The output should |
| be identical, apart from the initial identifying banner. |
| |
| For testing UTF-8 features, an alternative form of perltest, called perltest8, |
| is supplied. This requires Perl 5.6 or higher. It recognizes the special |
| modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke UTF-8 functionality. The testinput5 |
| file can be fed to perltest8. |
| |
| The testinput2 and testinput4 files are not suitable for feeding to perltest, |
| since they do make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that |
| pcretest uses to test some features of PCRE. The first of these files also |
| contains malformed regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses |
| them correctly. Similarly, testinput6 tests UTF-8 features that do not relate |
| to Perl. |
| |
| Philip Hazel <ph10@cam.ac.uk> |
| August 2000 |