libonig is a regex library for multi-bytes strings; it's used in particular by php-mbstring (either as embedded copy or linked to Debian's libonig, depending on Debian dist).

Smoke testing:

cd libonig-xxx/
debuild
make check

Sample direct C usage: usually for libonig 6.x, for libonig 5.x, drop onig_initialize() which doesn't exist yet and isn't needed.

PHP test suite:

cd php5-xxx/
debuild
cd cli-build
TEST_PHP_EXECUTABLE=sapi/cli/php sapi/cli/php ../run-tests.php ../ext/mbstring/

PHP script:

<?php
var_dump(mb_ereg("X+++", "hello"));