re.search much slower then grep on some regular expressions

[Kris Kennaway]

John Machin wrote:

> Uh-huh ... try this, then:
> 
> http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/ahocorasick/
> 
> You could use this to find the "Str" cases and the prefixes of the
> "re" cases (which seem to be no more complicated than 'foo.*bar.*zot')
> and use something slower like Python's re to search the remainder of
> the line for 'bar.*zot'.

If it was just strings, then sure...with regexps it might be possible to 
make it work, but it doesn't sound particularly maintainable.  I will 
stick with my shell script until python gets a regexp engine of 
equivalent performance.

Kris