Regular expressions vs find?

[Matthew Schinckel]

"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?
> 
> Bill

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.

Try both, use the profiler, and compare. (I'll guess someone else will
give an explanation about them).

Matt.