1The perltest program 2-------------------- 3 4The perltest.pl script tests Perl's regular expressions; it has the same 5specification as pcretest, and so can be given identical input, except that 6input patterns can be followed only by Perl's lower case modifiers and /+ (as 7used by pcretest), which is recognized and handled by the program. 8 9The data lines are processed as Perl double-quoted strings, so if they contain 10" $ or @ characters, these have to be escaped. For this reason, all such 11characters in testinput1, testinput4, testinput6, and testinput11 are escaped 12so that they can be used for perltest as well as for pcretest. The special 13upper case pattern modifiers such as /A that pcretest recognizes, and its 14special data line escapes, are not used in these files. The output should be 15identical, apart from the initial identifying banner. 16 17The perltest.pl script can also test UTF-8 features. It recognizes the special 18modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke UTF-8 functionality. The testinput4 19and testinput6 files can be fed to perltest to run compatible UTF-8 tests. 20However, it is necessary to add "use utf8;" to the script to make this work 21correctly. 22 23The testinput11 file contains tests that use features of Perl 5.10, so does not 24work with Perl 5.8. 25 26The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest.pl, since 27they make use of the special upper case modifiers and escapes that pcretest 28uses to test some features of PCRE. Some of these files also contains malformed 29regular expressions, in order to check that PCRE diagnoses them correctly. 30 31Philip Hazel 32October 2009 33