Return to the PCRE index page.
This page is part of the PCRE HTML documentation. It was generated automatically
from the original man page. If there is any nonsense in it, please consult the
man page, in case the conversion went wrong.
SYNOPSIS
#include <pcre.h>
pcre *pcre_compile(const char *pattern, int options, const char **errptr, int *erroffset, const unsigned char *tableptr);
This function compiles a regular expression into an internal form. Its arguments are:
pattern A zero-terminated string containing the
regular expression to be compiled
options Zero or more option bits
errptr Where to put an error message
erroffset Offset in pattern where error was found
tableptr Pointer to character tables, or NULL to
use the built-in default
The option bits are:
PCRE_ANCHORED Force pattern anchoring
PCRE_AUTO_CALLOUT Compile automatic callouts
PCRE_CASELESS Do caseless matching
PCRE_DOLLAR_ENDONLY $ not to match newline at end
PCRE_DOTALL . matches anything including NL
PCRE_EXTENDED Ignore whitespace and # comments
PCRE_EXTRA PCRE extra features
(not much use currently)
PCRE_MULTILINE ^ and $ match newlines within data
PCRE_NO_AUTO_CAPTURE Disable numbered capturing paren-
theses (named ones available)
PCRE_UNGREEDY Invert greediness of quantifiers
PCRE_UTF8 Run in UTF-8 mode
PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK Do not check the pattern for UTF-8
validity (only relevant if
PCRE_UTF8 is set)
PCRE must be built with UTF-8 support in order to use PCRE_UTF8 and
PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK.
The yield of the function is a pointer to a private data structure that contains the compiled pattern, or NULL if an error was detected.
There is a complete description of the PCRE native API in the pcreapi page and a description of the POSIX API in the pcreposix page.
Return to the PCRE index page.