Ok, perl gurus! If I but ?: in front of all my evilrules like so:
/?:www\.spamhost\.com/i or /?:(www\.spamhost\.com)/i
Would the rules be faster? Because I can make that change on the end of the month run. And does this basically mean, "Forget about what came before this."?
Not quite. You put the ?: on the *inside* opening of a pair of parentheses, and it tells Perl "these parens are just for grouping; you don't need to actually remember what's in them for later backreferences". So, assuming you're not going to be doing anything involving $1, $2, etc, you can say things like:
/www\.(?:spamhost|evilspammer|nastyporn)\.com/i
Then Perl won't waste memory on remembering "spamhost", "evilspammer" or "nastyporn".
This isn't likely to be noticeably faster, but will reduce memory usage by at least a bit. And it only works on parentheses -- indeed, the operator is listed in the Camel Book's index as (?:) (and it's on page 68). In your second example, which would be /(?:www\.spamhost\.com)/i , I can't see any reason to use the parens at all, unless you actually *intend* to capture that text for some later use.
Hope this helps, even if it actually means you have no use for the operator.
--Kai MacTane
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