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Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:01:26 -0500
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Subject: Re: Why is regex so slow?
From: Skip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com>
To: Roy Smith <roy@panix.com>
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:48643

> I don't understand why the first way is so much slower.

I have no obvious answers, but a couple suggestions:

1. Can you anchor the pattern at the beginning of the line?  (use
match() instead of search())
2. Does it get faster it you eliminate the "(.*)" part of the pattern?
 It seems that if you find a line matching the first part of the
pattern, you could just as easily split the line yourself instead of
creating a group.

Skip