On Tue, 16 Nov 2010, Josh Paetzel wrote: > On Tuesday, November 16, 2010 11:01:02 am Mike Miller wrote: > > <snip> > > The old adage goes.... > > I once had a problem that I thought I'd solve with a regex. > Then I realized I had two problems. > > My O'RA regex book is about a thousand pages. Fun stuff but playing > with regexes is pretty much a never ending optimizing game. Eventually > the returns get very small compared the the effort expended, then you > stop, because hey, it's a multi gabigahurz system and it runs fast > enough.... I have that book. I probably read a chapter once. I use regex all the time in perl to do basic tasks and it presents no serious problems because I'm doing small jobs. When I have to repeatedly sift through a 3 GB file, it's a little different and so I spent a little more time on it. Note that I really didn't do anything about the regex -- I kept that the same. All the playing around was with the ordinary grep commands that I used as a filter before piping the data to the regex. The interesting finding was that -f, -F and -Ff all did the same thing in my application but -Ff was more than 30 times faster than -f. Mike