pcre2_serialize_encode(3) — Linux manual page

NAME \| SYNOPSIS \| DESCRIPTION \| COLOPHON

PCRE2_SER...ZE_ENCODE(3) Library Functions ManualPCRE2_SER...ZE_ENCODE(3)

NAME top

       PCRE2 - Perl-compatible regular expressions (revised API)

SYNOPSIS top


       #include <pcre2.h>

       int32_t pcre2_serialize_encode(const pcre2_code **codes,
         int32_t number_of_codes, uint8_t **serialized_bytes,
         PCRE2_SIZE *serialized_size, pcre2_general_context *gcontext);

DESCRIPTION top


       This function encodes a list of compiled patterns into a byte
       stream that can be saved on disc or elsewhere. Note that this is
       not an abstract format like Java or .NET. Conversion of the byte
       stream back into usable compiled patterns can only happen on a
       host that is running the same version of PCRE2, with the same code
       unit width, and the host must also have the same endianness,
       pointer width and PCRE2_SIZE type. The arguments for
       pcre2_serialize_encode() are:

         codes             pointer to a vector containing the list
         number_of_codes   number of slots in the vector
         serialized_bytes  set to point to the serialized byte stream
         serialized_size   set to the number of bytes in the byte stream
         gcontext          pointer to a general context or NULL

       The context argument is used to obtain memory for the byte stream.
       When the serialized data is no longer needed, it must be freed by
       calling pcre2_serialize_free(). The yield of the function is the
       number of serialized patterns, or one of the following negative
       error codes:

         PCRE2_ERROR_BADDATA      number_of_codes is zero or less
         PCRE2_ERROR_BADMAGIC     mismatch of id bytes in one of the
       patterns
         PCRE2_ERROR_MEMORY       memory allocation failed
         PCRE2_ERROR_MIXEDTABLES  the patterns do not all use the same
       tables
         PCRE2_ERROR_NULL         an argument other than gcontext is NULL

       PCRE2_ERROR_BADMAGIC means either that a pattern's code has been
       corrupted, or that a slot in the vector does not point to a
       compiled pattern.

       There is a complete description of the PCRE2 native API in the
       pcre2api page and a description of the serialization functions in
       the pcre2serialize page.

COLOPHON top

       This page is part of the PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular
       Expressions) project.  Information about the project can be found
       at ⟨http://www.pcre.org/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this
       manual page, see
       ⟨http://bugs.exim.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=PCRE⟩.  This page was
       obtained from the tarball fetched from
       ⟨https://github.com/PhilipHazel/pcre2.git⟩ on 2025-08-11.  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
       or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the
       page, or you have corrections or improvements to the information
       in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page),
       send a mail to [email protected]

PCRE2 10.46-DEV               13 August 2018     PCRE2_SER...ZE_ENCODE(3)