I agree with you, but this comes off as quite a defensive response :P. You don't need to sell me on Perl, I already am sold.

Perl is stronger at regex and that's the perception of it that I've had for long before I even thought to learn it. In a bullet-point list of Perl's strengths, it'll always come up. It also seems that Perl has had a reputation, in the past, of performing faster than Python (and Ruby). Given this I'm sure you'd understand why I found it surprising that Python performs better in all the simple regex cases I tried.

edit: I'm not sure about community support for Python, though it does seem stronger to me than you give it credit for. But I'll say that I certainly haven't found Perl lacking and I appreciate PerlMonks.

Thanks. -- David