Interesting perlversion you have. with me your code is slower. on using $& man perlvar states: 
	The use of this variable anywhere in a program
	imposes a considerable performance penalty on all
	regular expression matches.  See the
	Devel::SawAmpersand module from CPAN for more
	information.
Which is consitant with these results: 
Benchmark: timing 500000 iterations of regexpway...
 regexpway: 22 wallclock secs (22.50 usr +  0.05 sys = 22.55 CPU)

and

Benchmark: timing 500000 iterations of myway, regexpway...
     myway: 50 wallclock secs (49.41 usr +  0.18 sys = 49.59 CPU)
 regexpway: 25 wallclock secs (23.24 usr +  0.09 sys = 23.33 CPU)

In reply to RE: RE: form parsing, hex, HTML formatting by zodiac
in thread form parsing, hex, HTML formatting by Anonymous Monk

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