String search vs regexp search

[Anand Pillai]

Small point. If you notice the code, compilation time is
not included in the actual time calculated for regexp.

-Anand

tweedgeezer at hotmail.com (Jeremy Fincher) wrote in message news:<698f09f8.0310132019.4bd918b2 at posting.google.com>...
> Duncan Booth <duncan at NOSPAMrcp.co.uk> wrote in message news:<Xns941360C9B9445duncanrcpcouk at 127.0.0.1>...
> > The regular expression code has a startup penalty since it has to compile 
> > the regular expression at least once, however the actual searching may be 
> > faster than the naive str.find. If the time spent doing the search is 
> > sufficiently long compared with the time doing the compile, the regular 
> > expression may win out.
> 
> Both regular expression searching and string.find will do searching
> one character at a time; given that, it seems impossible to me that
> the hand-coded-in-C "naive" string.find could be slower than the
> machine-translated-coded-in-Python regular expression search. 
> Compilation time only serves to further increase string.find's
> advantage.
> 
> Jeremy