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<title>pcre_exec specification</title>
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<h1>pcre_exec man page</h1>

Return to the <a href="index.html">PCRE index page</a>.


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 &#60;pcre.h&#62;


int pcre_exec(const pcre *code, const pcre_extra *extra,
 const char *subject, int length, int startoffset,
 int options, int *ovector, int ovecsize);
 
 
int pcre16_exec(const pcre16 *code, const pcre16_extra *extra,
 PCRE_SPTR16 subject, int length, int startoffset,
 int options, int *ovector, int ovecsize);
 
 
int pcre32_exec(const pcre32 *code, const pcre32_extra *extra,
 PCRE_SPTR32 subject, int length, int startoffset,
 int options, int *ovector, int ovecsize);

 
DESCRIPTION
 

This function matches a compiled regular expression against a given subject
string, using a matching algorithm that is similar to Perl's. It returns
offsets to captured substrings. Its arguments are:
<pre>
 code Points to the compiled pattern
 extra Points to an associated pcre[16|32]_extra structure,
 or is NULL
 subject Points to the subject string
 length Length of the subject string
 startoffset Offset in the subject at which to start matching
 options Option bits
 ovector Points to a vector of ints for result offsets
 ovecsize Number of elements in the vector (a multiple of 3)
</pre>
The units for length and startoffset are bytes for
pcre_exec(), 16-bit data items for pcre16_exec(), and 32-bit items
for pcre32_exec(). The options are:
<pre>
 PCRE_ANCHORED Match only at the first position
 PCRE_BSR_ANYCRLF \R matches only CR, LF, or CRLF
 PCRE_BSR_UNICODE \R matches all Unicode line endings
 PCRE_NEWLINE_ANY Recognize any Unicode newline sequence
 PCRE_NEWLINE_ANYCRLF Recognize CR, LF, & CRLF as newline sequences
 PCRE_NEWLINE_CR Recognize CR as the only newline sequence
 PCRE_NEWLINE_CRLF Recognize CRLF as the only newline sequence
 PCRE_NEWLINE_LF Recognize LF as the only newline sequence
 PCRE_NOTBOL Subject string is not the beginning of a line
 PCRE_NOTEOL Subject string is not the end of a line
 PCRE_NOTEMPTY An empty string is not a valid match
 PCRE_NOTEMPTY_ATSTART An empty string at the start of the subject
 is not a valid match
 PCRE_NO_START_OPTIMIZE Do not do "start-match" optimizations
 PCRE_NO_UTF16_CHECK Do not check the subject for UTF-16
 validity (only relevant if PCRE_UTF16
 was set at compile time)
 PCRE_NO_UTF32_CHECK Do not check the subject for UTF-32
 validity (only relevant if PCRE_UTF32
 was set at compile time)
 PCRE_NO_UTF8_CHECK Do not check the subject for UTF-8
 validity (only relevant if PCRE_UTF8
 was set at compile time)
 PCRE_PARTIAL ) Return PCRE_ERROR_PARTIAL for a partial
 PCRE_PARTIAL_SOFT ) match if no full matches are found
 PCRE_PARTIAL_HARD Return PCRE_ERROR_PARTIAL for a partial match
 if that is found before a full match
</pre>
For details of partial matching, see the
<a href="pcrepartial.html">pcrepartial</a>
page. A pcre_extra structure contains the following fields:
<pre>
 flags Bits indicating which fields are set
 study_data Opaque data from pcre[16|32]_study()
 match_limit Limit on internal resource use
 match_limit_recursion Limit on internal recursion depth
 callout_data Opaque data passed back to callouts
 tables Points to character tables or is NULL
 mark For passing back a *MARK pointer
 executable_jit Opaque data from JIT compilation
</pre>
The flag bits are PCRE_EXTRA_STUDY_DATA, PCRE_EXTRA_MATCH_LIMIT,
PCRE_EXTRA_MATCH_LIMIT_RECURSION, PCRE_EXTRA_CALLOUT_DATA,
PCRE_EXTRA_TABLES, PCRE_EXTRA_MARK and PCRE_EXTRA_EXECUTABLE_JIT.


There is a complete description of the PCRE native API in the
<a href="pcreapi.html">pcreapi</a>
page and a description of the POSIX API in the
<a href="pcreposix.html">pcreposix</a>
page.

Return to the <a href="index.html">PCRE index page</a>.

.	Edit
..	Edit
NON-AUTOTOOLS-BUILD.txt	Edit
README.txt	Edit
index.html	Edit
pcre-config.html	Edit
pcre.html	Edit
pcre16.html	Edit
pcre32.html	Edit
pcre_assign_jit_stack.html	Edit
pcre_compile.html	Edit
pcre_compile2.html	Edit
pcre_config.html	Edit
pcre_copy_named_substring.html	Edit
pcre_copy_substring.html	Edit
pcre_dfa_exec.html	Edit
pcre_exec.html	Edit
pcre_free_study.html	Edit
pcre_free_substring.html	Edit
pcre_free_substring_list.html	Edit
pcre_fullinfo.html	Edit
pcre_get_named_substring.html	Edit
pcre_get_stringnumber.html	Edit
pcre_get_stringtable_entries.html	Edit
pcre_get_substring.html	Edit
pcre_get_substring_list.html	Edit
pcre_jit_exec.html	Edit
pcre_jit_stack_alloc.html	Edit
pcre_jit_stack_free.html	Edit
pcre_maketables.html	Edit
pcre_pattern_to_host_byte_order.html	Edit
pcre_refcount.html	Edit
pcre_study.html	Edit
pcre_utf16_to_host_byte_order.html	Edit
pcre_utf32_to_host_byte_order.html	Edit
pcre_version.html	Edit
pcreapi.html	Edit
pcrebuild.html	Edit
pcrecallout.html	Edit
pcrecompat.html	Edit
pcrecpp.html	Edit
pcredemo.html	Edit
pcregrep.html	Edit
pcrejit.html	Edit
pcrelimits.html	Edit
pcrematching.html	Edit
pcrepartial.html	Edit
pcrepattern.html	Edit
pcreperform.html	Edit
pcreposix.html	Edit
pcreprecompile.html	Edit
pcresample.html	Edit
pcrestack.html	Edit
pcresyntax.html	Edit
pcretest.html	Edit
pcreunicode.html	Edit