Selecting text using REGEX

[Alex Rice]

On Sunday, September 28, 2003, at 09:55  AM, Mark Brownell wrote:

> There is probably a regEx way but I have found that this tends to be 
> faster in most speed tests.

I believe you it's faster in this case, but regex is usually faster 
than one might think. It is after all calling an optimized C library to 
do all the work :-)

Here are two trim whitespace functions that had written. To my surprise 
the regex variant is way, way faster!

--
-- regex method
--
function trim pText
   get replaceText(pText, "^\s+", empty)
   return replaceText(it, "\s+$", empty)
end trim

--
-- non regex method 
--
local lWhitespaceChars

on startup
  -- prepare list of characters to be used by trim()
  -- CRLF = ascii 13+10
  put tab & space & CRLF into lWhitespaceChars
end startup

function trim pText
   repeat while char 1 of pText is in lWhitespaceChars
     delete char 1 of pText
   end repeat
   repeat while char -1 of pText is in lWhitespaceChars
     delete char -1 of pText
   end repeat
   return pText
end trim


Alex Rice <alex at mindlube.com> | Mindlube Software | http://mindlube.com

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable  -Ani DiFranco