Perl Compatible Regular Expressions

Perl Compatible Regular Expressions ( PCRE short, English for " Perl - compatible regular expressions " ) is a program library for the evaluation and application of regular expressions. The name refers to the fact that the syntax of the expressions of the Perl programming language was borrowed. It corresponds approximately to the state of Perl 5, but also includes additional syntax elements. Since Perl and PCRE are developed separately, there are some differences between alternative spelling such as for named cache (English named capture buffer) and differences between each accepted syntax elements that pcrecompat in the man page (3) are documented.

PCRE was originally developed by Philip Hazel for use with Exim and is licensed under the BSD license. Many projects use PCRE, including Apache, GLib, KDE, Ruby, Python and PHP. Also, Perl can it with the help of the module re :: engine :: PCRE access, but itself has its own, much more complex library.