Regular expressions vs find?

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <20000619184000.639516 at 210.9.22.17>,
Matthew Schinckel  <matt at null.net> wrote:
>"William Dandreta" <wjdandreta at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>>
>> I recently read a message that suggested that using regular
>> expressions might be faster than the find function. I've heard the
>> term regular expression used from time to time but I don't know what
>> it means. Could someone give me a simple explanation?
>
>I have come across one example where re was much faster than using
>string.find: I was stripping out html tags, and doing a one line
>re.sub('<*?>','') was much faster than using string.find() and slice
>notation.

Sure!  But then you're not really doing just a string.find().  The point
is that for any operation where string.find() alone can be used, it will
be faster than an re.  Any time you add complexity, such as find/replace
with a pattern rather than a fixed string, chances are good that the re
will be faster.
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