This file has advice to help you merge newer versions of PCRE.

JavaScriptCore's PCRE is currently based on:

    PCRE 6.4

With the following differences.

     1) We added a PCRE_UTF16 define that makes a library that works on UTF-16 strings
        rather than on ASCII or UTF-8.

        We introduced the public typedef pcre_char and the internal typedef pcre_uchar.

        We changed access to the digitab and ctypes arrays to range check and work only
        on values in the 0-255 range.

        We changed GETCHAR, GETCHRATEST, GETCHARINC, GETCHARINCTEST, and GETCHARLEN
        so they work on UTF-16.

        We added ISMIDCHAR to abstract the notion of characters to skip over, and
        handle it right regardless of UTF-16 or UTF-8, and changed code to call it
        when appropriate.

        We added GETUTF8CHARLEN and GETUTF8CHARINC, to be used in cases where we always
        process UTF-8, even if the subject string is UTF-16, and changed code to call
        them when appropriate.

     2) We added a JAVASCRIPT define that turns off and alters various features to match
        the requirements of the JavaScript language specification.

        We removed these:

            \C \E \G \L \N \P \Q \U \X \Z
            \e \l \p \u \z
            [::] [..] [==]
            (?#) (?<=) (?<!) (?>)
            (?C) (?P) (?R)
            (?0) (and 1-9)
            (?imsxUX)

        And we added these:

            \u \v

        And we changed the semantics for \1-style backreferences to parentheses that
        are not included in a match to match the empty string instead of not matching
        anything: This is a difference between the JavaScript language specification and
        the perl script.

        And we include ASCII 0x0B as a space.

     3) We made a more-efficient version of the NO_RECURSE mode that uses goto or computed
        goto statements instead of setjmp/longjmp, since it's so much faster that way.
        We also allocated the first 16 stack frames on the stack instead of using malloc
        every time; we use malloc for deeper nesting.

        This included adding a numeric parameter to the RMATCH macro.

     4) The original PCRE relied on having the input be a null-terminated string,
        even though pcre_exec takes a length parameter. We removed that restriction,
        passing additional parameters internally to make sure the code does not read
        off the end of the input buffer.

        We added the macro GETCHARLENEND to be used in some places where GETCHARLEN
        might otherwise walk off the end of the buffer.

     5) We added code to forbid values that are not Unicode characters from being used in
        \x and \u escape sequences in regular expressions.

     6) We changed the names of the public entry points to have a kjs prefix so they don't
        collide with a "real" copy of PCRE at link or load time.

     7) We added a hand-edited pcre-config.h, which is used instead of a configure-generated
        config.h file. Note, this is made from the config.h.in from the PCRE distribution.

     8) We eliminated non-ASCII characters from the source files (they were used only
        in one or two places).

     9) We removed many unused source files.

    10) We marked some additional global data tables const.

    11) And we fixed some compiler warnings.

For easy merging:

     1) We look for approaches that minimize changes to the base PCRE code.

     2) When making global changes we leave code alone that we're not compiling.
        So code that's inside #if !JAVASCRIPT need not have the other changes above.

        This can be a bit strange. For example, there's a choice about what to do with
        the code to handle an end of pattern pointer or length rather than a trailing
        zero. Our strategy is to not make enhancements to the code that we're not
        compiling, so if you turned off the JAVASCRIPT flag, you'd find that the
        range checking changes are incomplete. This is solely to aid merging.

     3) We are willing to format code strangely to minimize the differences from
        the base PCRE code.

Differences from the base PCRE code should be viewed with these comments in mind.