# pcre_compile man page

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SYNOPSIS

#include <pcre.h>

pcre *pcre_compile(const char *pattern, int options, const char **errptr, int *erroffset, const unsigned char *tableptr);

DESCRIPTION

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_DUPNAMES         Allow duplicate names for subpatterns
      PCRE_EXTENDED         Ignore whitespace and # comments
      PCRE_EXTRA            PCRE extra features
                              (not much use currently)
      PCRE_FIRSTLINE        Force matching to be before newline
      PCRE_MULTILINE        ^ and $ match newlines within data
      PCRE_NEWLINE_CR       Set CR as the newline sequence
      PCRE_NEWLINE_CRLF     Set CRLF as the newline sequence
      PCRE_NEWLINE_LF       Set LF as the newline sequence
      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.

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