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+++ b/libraries/spcre/libpcre/pcre/doc/perltest.txt	Wed Jun 23 15:52:26 2010 +0100
@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+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 testinput4 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 script can also test UTF-8 features. It works as is for Perl 5.8
+or higher. It recognizes the special modifier /8 that pcretest uses to invoke
+UTF-8 functionality. The testinput4 file can be fed to perltest to run
+compatible UTF-8 tests.
+
+For Perl 5.6, perltest won't work unmodified for the UTF-8 tests. You need to
+uncomment the "use utf8" lines that it contains. It is best to do this on a
+copy of the script, because for non-UTF-8 tests, these lines should remain
+commented out.
+
+The other testinput files are not suitable for feeding to perltest, 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
+September 2004