Regex (MatchText) speed

[Brian Yennie]

Troy,

My 2 cents- it totally depends on what kind of RegEx you're ending up 
with.

RegEx buys you power for expressing complex rules. A hand crafted 
solution will almost always run faster, it's just a matter of whether 
you can afford to write new code for every case instead of just 
accumulating expressions and letting the RegEx engine do the work.

For example, if I wanted to remove HTML tags from text, I'd probably 
use something hand-crafted for speed. If I wanted to verify a valid URL 
in a strict standards-compliant sense, I'd probably drop in the nasty 
RegEx because I wouldn't trust my hand-crafted code to catch everything 
without a ton of effort.

- Brian