Perl-совместимые регулярные выражения (Perl-compatible regular expressions)
PCRE 8-BIT, 16-BIT, AND 32-BIT LIBRARIES
As well as support for 8-bit character strings, PCRE also
supports 16-bit strings (from release 8.30) and 32-bit strings
(from release 8.32), by means of two additional libraries. They
can be built as well as, or instead of, the 8-bit library. To
avoid too much complication, this document describes the 8-bit
versions of the functions, with only occasional references to the
16-bit and 32-bit libraries.
The 16-bit and 32-bit functions operate in the same way as their
8-bit counterparts; they just use different data types for their
arguments and results, and their names start with pcre16_ or
pcre32_ instead of pcre_. For every option that has UTF8 in its
name (for example, PCRE_UTF8), there are corresponding 16-bit and
32-bit names with UTF8 replaced by UTF16 or UTF32, respectively.
This facility is in fact just cosmetic; the 16-bit and 32-bit
option names define the same bit values.
References to bytes and UTF-8 in this document should be read as
references to 16-bit data units and UTF-16 when using the 16-bit
library, or 32-bit data units and UTF-32 when using the 32-bit
library, unless specified otherwise. More details of the
specific differences for the 16-bit and 32-bit libraries are
given in the pcre16 and pcre32 pages.
