installing R 3.3.3 on Ubuntu 17.04: yet another configuration error due to pcre

Question

Downloading the R source and running ./configure results in

checking whether PCRE support suffices... configure: error: pcre >= 8.10 library and headers are required

But sudo apt-get install libpcre3 libpcre3-dev gives me

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libpcre3 is already the newest version (2:8.39-3).
libpcre3-dev is already the newest version (2:8.39-3).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Answer 1

My problem was that I did not enable UTF-8 support when I installed pcre from the source. Step 9C this post cleared it up. The post is the best guide I have found for installing R on Linux, but getting curl to compile with ssl was still a pain.