On 7/10/06 4:23 PM, "Mark Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Not to disparage regexes, but everytime I see one of these neat one- > line regex solutions on the list, and it's something that I might > make use of, I seem to find that when used either many times in a > loop, or just on a lot of data, it turns out be at least quite a lot > slower than some function that uses Revs chunk expressions/repeat for > loops.
> I have no idea how efficient the PCRE library is, or how efficiently > Rev uses that library, but it usually seems to be enough of a > noticeable difference that I stick with the pure Revolution solution. The use of RegEx is very powerful in the right place. The basic idea is that the PCRE engine will travel through a block of text applying rules rather than simply doing character comparisons. Short strings are fast and longer ones exponentially slower. The reason for this is usually that RegEx is a way of looking at patterns and character types/classes rather than specific characters. I use RegEx frequently when extracting data from web-style published data. In this case, the data is embedded in formatting instructions called tags. To write a 'pure Rev solution' would be as much as 30 to 100 lines of code. I have RegEx working for me all day, every day, and in such a way that it is very fast, compact, and complex. However, I just finished a Rev-only data extractor because it is the right tool for this job. Jim Ault Las Vegas _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
