You are absolutely right that the functions as presented are lacking in several ways. Also the useless passing of $_ is duly noted.

In my defence I would say that this was just an exercise in looking at the relative speed of the methods, and so much of the sanity checking and so on was omitted for clarity. The functions are just regexps - no more no less. That way all of the speed differential is due to the stripping of whitespace and very else.

--tidiness is the memory loss of environmental mnemonics