---
name: "pcre2_serialize_free"
section: "3"
platform: "linux"
package: "pcre2"
version: "10.49-1"
release: "Arch Linux 2026-11-01"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/pcre2_serialize_free"
---

# pcre2\_serialize\_free(3)

Perl-compatible regular expressions (revised API)

## NAME

PCRE2 - Perl-compatible regular expressions (revised API)

## SYNOPSIS

**#include \<pcre2.h\>**

```
void pcre2_serialize_free(uint8_t *bytes);
```

## DESCRIPTION

This function frees the memory that was obtained by **pcre2\_serialize\_encode()** to hold a serialized byte stream. The argument must point to such a byte stream or be NULL, in which case the function returns without doing anything.

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.