I did try moveing the re.compile's up and out of the replacecylce() but it didn't impact the time in any meaningful way (2 seconds maybe)...
I'm not sure what an shell+sed script is... I'm fairly new to Python and my only other coding experience is with VBA... This was my first Python program In case it helps... We started with only 6 loops of replacecycle() but had to keep adding progressively more as we found more and more links with lots of spaces in them... As we did that, the program's time grew progressively longer but the length grew multiplicatively with the added number of cycles... This is exactly what I would have expected and it leads me to believe that the problem does not lie in the replacecycle() def but in the masseditor() def... *shrug* -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
