[FEEDBACK] Is this script efficient...is there a better way?

[jepler at unpythonic.net]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 02:53:23PM -0700, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote:
> As a final comment you need to be aware that the more keywords you look for 
> the slower this will be.  However there is not a way to get around that, it 
> is just something to keep in mind.

With a good, simple Regular Expression like
    literal1|literal2|...
the time spent searching one string for the compiled RE should be only
proportional to the number of characters in the scanned string (It's just a
big table of state transitions).  This is more cycles per character than
a simple comparison, but for some number of comparisons N you start to win.

I hope that Python's implementation of REs has this property, but I'm not
certain.  Needing to support things like backrefs and lookahead-assertions
blows this nice simple model of REs out of the water.

Jeff