On Feb 14, Michael Fowler said: >As mentioned by a couple of people, the non-greedy version of * is one way >of going about it: > > $String =~ /^(.*?):/; > >A faster way, however, is to realize that what you really want is >anything-but-a-colon followed by a colon: > > $String =~ /^([^:]+):/;
As of Perl 5.6.2 (not released yet), /^(.*?):/ and /^([^:]*):/ will have the same efficiency (read: speed). If you're curious, currently /^.*?:/ and /^[^:]*:/ have the same speed -- it's the capturing that killed .*?, but I have fixed that. And personally, I'd use /([^:]*)/ instead of /^([^:]*):/, since they match the same thing (assuming there IS a colon in the string). Or I'd use /(.*?):/ instead of /^(.*?):/ but whatever. -- Jeff "japhy" Pinyan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/ RPI Acacia brother #734 http://www.perlmonks.org/ http://www.cpan.org/ ** Look for "Regular Expressions in Perl" published by Manning, in 2002 ** <stu> what does y/// stand for? <tenderpuss> why, yansliterate of course. [ I'm looking for programming work. If you like my work, let me know. ] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
