re.search much slower then grep on some regular expressions

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

Paddy:
> You could argue that if the costly RE features are not used then maybe
> simpler, faster algorithms should be automatically swapped in but ....

Many Python implementations contains a TCL interpreter. TCL REs may be
better than Python ones, so it can be interesting to benchmark the
same RE with TCL, to see how much time it needs. If someone here knows
TCL it may require to write just few lines of TCL code (used through
tkinter, by direct call).

Bye,
bearophile