use Perl

• Dang, I wish I knew this a few years ago (Score:1)

  by btilly (5037)

  I figured it out on my own and thought I had figured out something new.
• It's a very nice article (Score:2)

  by bart (450)

  ... but I wish their conclusion wasn't so bozo:

  Regular expression matching can be simple and fast, using finite automata-based techniques that have been known for decades. In contrast, Perl, PCRE, Python, Ruby, Java, and many other languages have regular expression implementations based on recursive backtracking that are simple but can be excruciatingly slow.

  ... for pathetic expressions!

  We're indeed talking about the regular expression /a?a?a?aaa/ which no experienced Perl code would ever use in real code
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Aristotle (5147)

    Rewrite it, for example, as

    /(?:a(?:a(?:a)?)?)?aaa/

    Err, come again? Surely you mean “/a{3,6}/”?
    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bart (450)

      Even better. :)

      I'm just saying that every pathetic regexp can most likely be rewritten into something that is not pathetic witout much trouble — and possibly even be optimized.
• Rewriting Regexes (Score:1)

  by Mark Leighton Fisher (4252)

  I thought the article was important enough to post but I have to confess, I've never run into the problems shown in the article. I've even written my own (simple) regex matcher in C without running into those problems. Maybe this is an example of Jamie Zawinski's

  Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

  or Abraham Maslow's:

  If you only have a hammer then you treat everything like a nail.

  Sometimes, you really don't