question about nasty regex

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In article <7xacb2fdyt.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com>,
 Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:

>"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ``I know, I'll use
>regular expressions.'' Now they have two problems."  --JWZ

Regexes are good if you need a solution quickly, and you're not 
processing large amounts of data on a regular basis. (How large is 
large? When you're chewing through appreciable amounts of CPU time doing 
it.)

Once you get to that point, it would be more efficient to hand-code your 
own state machine to do the parsing. Of course, doing it in an (even 
partially) interpreted language like Python or Perl would defeat the 
point...