PHP PCRE (regex) doesn't support UTF-8?

Question

I am attempting to run a regex on my site, and I am getting this response:

Compilation failed: support for \P, \p, and \X has not been compiled at offset 1

After googling for a bit, I've found that apparently my PCRE on my server is not UTF8 enabled, and is therefore causing problems. When I ssh with pcretest -C I get

PCRE version 6.6 06-Feb-2006

Compiled with UTF-8 support No Unicode properties support Newline character is LF Internal link size = 2 POSIX malloc threshold = 10
Default match limit = 10000000
Default recursion depth limit = 10000000 Match recursion uses stack

When I do yum update pcre it tells me that there isn't anything to update.

People are telling me that I can turn on UTF-8 support...help?

I am a noob.

Answer 1

Yum should now find v6.6.6.el5_6.1 of PCRE in its repositories, so performing a yum update pcre resolved the issue for me on Centos 5.

Answer 2

There's a good tutorial on rebuilding the RPM for pcre here.

If you scroll down to "Updated RPM file for..." you'll find some pre-built RPM's if you just want it to work (remember to restart Apache after you're done, not just a graceful reload).

The tl;dr version is: recompile pcre with --enable-utf8 and --enable-unicode-properties

Answer 3

PHP doesn't use the "pcre" application/package. PCRE support is built in to the PHP libraries. The error you're getting is telling you that your PHP libraries were not compiled with PCRE UTF-8 support.

You'll need to recompile PHP with the proper PCRE static library built with the proper UTF-8 option.