NAME

UNICODE AND UTF SUPPORT

There are two ways of telling PCRE2 to switch to UTF mode, where characters may consist of more than one code unit and the range of values is constrained. The program can call pcre2_compile() with the PCRE2_UTF option, or the pattern may start with the sequence (*UTF). However, the latter facility can be locked out by the PCRE2_NEVER_UTF option. That is, the programmer can prevent the supplier of the pattern from switching to UTF mode.

Note that the PCRE2_MATCH_INVALID_UTF option (see below) forces PCRE2_UTF to be set.

In UTF mode, both the pattern and any subject strings that are matched against it are treated as UTF strings instead of strings of individual one-code-unit characters. There are also some other changes to the way characters are handled, as documented below.

UNICODE PROPERTY SUPPORT

WIDE CHARACTERS AND UTF MODES

The escape sequence \N{U+<hex digits>} is recognized as another way of specifying a Unicode character by code point in a UTF mode. It is not allowed in non-UTF mode.

In UTF mode, repeat quantifiers apply to complete UTF characters, not to individual code units.

In UTF mode, the dot metacharacter matches one UTF character instead of a single code unit.

In UTF mode, capture group names are not restricted to ASCII, and may contain any Unicode letters and decimal digits, as well as underscore.

The escape sequence \C can be used to match a single code unit in UTF mode, but its use can lead to some strange effects because it breaks up multi-unit characters (see the description of \C in the pcre2pattern documentation). For this reason, there is a build-time option that disables support for \C completely. There is also a less draconian compile-time option for locking out the use of \C when a pattern is compiled.

The use of \C is not supported by the alternative matching function pcre2_dfa_match() when in UTF-8 or UTF-16 mode, that is, when a character may consist of more than one code unit. The use of \C in these modes provokes a match-time error. Also, the JIT optimization does not support \C in these modes. If JIT optimization is requested for a UTF-8 or UTF-16 pattern that contains \C, it will not succeed, and so when pcre2_match() is called, the matching will be carried out by the interpretive function.

The character escapes \b, \B, \d, \D, \s, \S, \w, and \W correctly test characters of any code value, but, by default, the characters that PCRE2 recognizes as digits, spaces, or word characters remain the same set as in non-UTF mode, all with code points less than 256. This remains true even when PCRE2 is built to include Unicode support, because to do otherwise would slow down matching in many common cases. Note that this also applies to \b and \B, because they are defined in terms of \w and \W. If you want to test for a wider sense of, say, "digit", you can use explicit Unicode property tests such as \p{Nd}. Alternatively, if you set the PCRE2_UCP option, the way that the character escapes work is changed so that Unicode properties are used to determine which characters match. There are more details in the section on generic character types in the pcre2pattern documentation.

Similarly, characters that match the POSIX named character classes are all low-valued characters, unless the PCRE2_UCP option is set.

However, the special horizontal and vertical white space matching escapes (\h, \H, \v, and \V) do match all the appropriate Unicode characters, whether or not PCRE2_UCP is set.

UNICODE CASE-EQUIVALENCE

SCRIPT RUNS

Every Unicode character has a Script property, mostly with a value corresponding to the name of a script, such as Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic. There are also three special values:

"Unknown" is used for code points that have not been assigned, and also for the surrogate code points. In the PCRE2 32-bit library, characters whose code points are greater than the Unicode maximum (U+10FFFF), which are accessible only in non-UTF mode, are assigned the Unknown script.

"Common" is used for characters that are used with many scripts. These include punctuation, emoji, mathematical, musical, and currency symbols, and the ASCII digits 0 to 9.

"Inherited" is used for characters such as diacritical marks that modify a previous character. These are considered to take on the script of the character that they modify.

Some Inherited characters are used with many scripts, but many of them are only normally used with a small number of scripts. For example, U+102E0 (Coptic Epact thousands mark) is used only with Arabic and Coptic. In order to make it possible to check this, a Unicode property called Script Extension exists. Its value is a list of scripts that apply to the character. For the majority of characters, the list contains just one script, the same one as the Script property. However, for characters such as U+102E0 more than one Script is listed. There are also some Common characters that have a single, non-Common script in their Script Extension list.

The next section describes the basic rules for deciding whether a given string of characters is a script run. Note, however, that there are some special cases involving the Chinese Han script, and an additional constraint for decimal digits. These are covered in subsequent sections.

VALIDITY OF UTF STRINGS

In some situations, you may already know that your strings are valid, and therefore want to skip these checks in order to improve performance, for example in the case of a long subject string that is being scanned repeatedly. If you set the PCRE2_NO_UTF_CHECK option at compile time or at match time, PCRE2 assumes that the pattern or subject it is given (respectively) contains only valid UTF code unit sequences.

If you pass an invalid UTF string when PCRE2_NO_UTF_CHECK is set, the result is undefined and your program may crash or loop indefinitely or give incorrect results. There is, however, one mode of matching that can handle invalid UTF subject strings. This is enabled by passing PCRE2_MATCH_INVALID_UTF to pcre2_compile() and is discussed below in the next section. The rest of this section covers the case when PCRE2_MATCH_INVALID_UTF is not set.

Passing PCRE2_NO_UTF_CHECK to pcre2_compile() just disables the UTF check for the pattern; it does not also apply to subject strings. If you want to disable the check for a subject string you must pass this same option to pcre2_match() or pcre2_dfa_match().

UTF-16 and UTF-32 strings can indicate their endianness by special code knows as a byte-order mark (BOM). The PCRE2 functions do not handle this, expecting strings to be in host byte order.

Unless PCRE2_NO_UTF_CHECK is set, a UTF string is checked before any other processing takes place. In the case of pcre2_match() and pcre2_dfa_match() calls with a non-zero starting offset, the check is applied only to that part of the subject that could be inspected during matching, and there is a check that the starting offset points to the first code unit of a character or to the end of the subject. If there are no lookbehind assertions in the pattern, the check starts at the starting offset. Otherwise, it starts at the length of the longest lookbehind before the starting offset, or at the start of the subject if there are not that many characters before the starting offset. Note that the sequences \b and \B are one-character lookbehinds.

In addition to checking the format of the string, there is a check to ensure that all code points lie in the range U+0 to U+10FFFF, excluding the surrogate area. The so-called "non-character" code points are not excluded because Unicode corrigendum #9 makes it clear that they should not be.

Characters in the "Surrogate Area" of Unicode are reserved for use by UTF-16, where they are used in pairs to encode code points with values greater than 0xFFFF. The code points that are encoded by UTF-16 pairs are available independently in the UTF-8 and UTF-32 encodings. (In other words, the whole surrogate thing is a fudge for UTF-16 which unfortunately messes up UTF-8 and UTF-32.)

Setting PCRE2_NO_UTF_CHECK at compile time does not disable the error that is given if an escape sequence for an invalid Unicode code point is encountered in the pattern. If you want to allow escape sequences such as \x{d800} (a surrogate code point) you can set the PCRE2_EXTRA_ALLOW_SURROGATE_ESCAPES extra option. However, this is possible only in UTF-8 and UTF-32 modes, because these values are not representable in UTF-16.

MATCHING IN INVALID UTF STRINGS

Setting PCRE2_MATCH_INVALID_UTF does not affect what pcre2_compile() generates, but if pcre2_jit_compile() is subsequently called, it does generate different code. If JIT is not used, the option affects the behaviour of the interpretive code in pcre2_match(). When PCRE2_MATCH_INVALID_UTF is set at compile time, PCRE2_NO_UTF_CHECK is ignored at match time.

In this mode, an invalid code unit sequence in the subject never matches any pattern item. It does not match dot, it does not match \p{Any}, it does not even match negative items such as [^X]. A lookbehind assertion fails if it encounters an invalid sequence while moving the current point backwards. In other words, an invalid UTF code unit sequence acts as a barrier which no match can cross.

You can also think of this as the subject being split up into fragments of valid UTF, delimited internally by invalid code unit sequences. The pattern is matched fragment by fragment. The result of a successful match, however, is given as code unit offsets in the entire subject string in the usual way. There are a few points to consider:

The internal boundaries are not interpreted as the beginnings or ends of lines and so do not match circumflex or dollar characters in the pattern.

If pcre2_match() is called with an offset that points to an invalid UTF-sequence, that sequence is skipped, and the match starts at the next valid UTF character, or the end of the subject.

At internal fragment boundaries, \b and \B behave in the same way as at the beginning and end of the subject. For example, a sequence such as \bWORD\b would match an instance of WORD that is surrounded by invalid UTF code units.

Using PCRE2_MATCH_INVALID_UTF, an application can run matches on arbitrary data, knowing that any matched strings that are returned are valid UTF. This can be useful when searching for UTF text in executable or other binary files.

AUTHOR

Philip Hazel
University Computing Service
Cambridge, England.

REVISION

Last updated: 23 February 2020
Copyright (c) 1997-2020 University of Cambridge.