Hello dominic01,

The Camel Book (4^th Edition, 2012) has a section on “Time Efficiency” which contains the following (p. 692):

Short-circuit alternation is often faster than the corresponding regex. So:

print if /one-hump/ || /two/;
[download]

is likely to be faster than:

print if /one-hump|two/;
[download]

at least for certain values of one-hump and two.

Also, if your regex is more likely to find a space than a punctuation character, test for the space first. Only profiling will show whether these kinds of tweaks make significant improvements, but they’re worth a try.

Hope that helps,