PCRELIMITS(3)						     Library Functions Manual						     PCRELIMITS(3)

NAME

       PCRE - Perl-compatible regular expressions

SIZE AND OTHER LIMITATIONS


       There are some size limitations in PCRE but it is hoped that they will never in practice be relevant.

       The maximum length of a compiled pattern is approximately 64K data units (bytes for the 8-bit library, 16-bit units for the 16-bit library)
       if PCRE is compiled with the default internal linkage size of 2 bytes. If you want to process regular expressions that are truly  enormous,
       you  can compile PCRE with an internal linkage size of 3 or 4 (when building the 16-bit library, 3 is rounded up to 4). See the README file
       in the source distribution and the pcrebuild documentation for details. In these cases the limit is  substantially  larger.   However,  the
       speed of execution is slower.

       All values in repeating quantifiers must be less than 65536.

       There is no limit to the number of parenthesized subpatterns, but there can be no more than 65535 capturing subpatterns.

       There  is  a  limit to the number of forward references to subsequent subpatterns of around 200,000. Repeated forward references with fixed
       upper limits, for example, (?2){0,100} when subpattern number 2 is to the right, are included in the count. There is no limit to the number
       of backward references.

       The maximum length of name for a named subpattern is 32 characters, and the maximum number of named subpatterns is 10000.

       The  maximum  length  of  a subject string is the largest positive number that an integer variable can hold. However, when using the tradi-
       tional matching function, PCRE uses recursion to handle subpatterns and indefinite repetition.  This means that the available  stack  space
       may limit the size of a subject string that can be processed by certain patterns. For a discussion of stack issues, see the pcrestack docu-
       mentation.

AUTHOR


       Philip Hazel
       University Computing Service
       Cambridge CB2 3QH, England.

REVISION


       Last updated: 08 January 2012
       Copyright (c) 1997-2012 University of Cambridge.

																     PCRELIMITS(3)