AW: AW: How trim: Bug in RegExp engine

[Dave Cragg]

On 25 Oct 2005, at 22:39, Thomas Fischer wrote:
>
> 2. I didn't want to sound too harsh, sorry.

And if my reply sounded harsh, sorry too.

>
> 3. It seems that regular expressions are to be avoided in time  
> sensitive parts of the script anyway. Playing around a little bit I  
> found that the RegExp solution I suggested took far more time than  
> any other solution (by about a factor of 10 compared with the  
> fastest solution). Probably this should be optimized in an updated  
> version. It seems that regular expressions in Perl are by a factor  
> 6 faster (and again 8 times faster on my PC laptop).

I believe that replaceText received a performance boost in the 2.6.1  
version. I don't how much of a difference it makes. But I'm not  
surprised that Perl handles regular expressions faster. That's what  
it was built for. (On the other hand, it's not too good at drag and  
drop. :-) )

> On the other hand, this shows that those cumbersome repeat loops  
> are surprisingly fast.

And usually easier to read than regular expressions.


> All in all, Bob's idea "to ask questions that make them want to  
> crawl under the table in shame because probably the answer is  
> idiotically simple." turned out to keep people busy and excited for  
> quite a while. Proves again that there are no simple questions...

Absolutely.

Regards
Dave