As the original case is some parser like this:

sub parseAny
{
   #my $p      = shift;  # pkg or doc
   my $c      = shift;
   #my $objnum = shift;
   #my $gennum = shift;
 
   return ${$c} =~ m/ \G \d+\s+\d+\s+R\b /xms  ? 'parseRef(      $c, $
+objnum, $gennum)'
        : ${$c} =~ m{ \G /               }xms  ? 'parseLabel(    $c, $
+objnum, $gennum)'
        : ${$c} =~ m/ \G <<              /xms  ? 'parseDict(     $c, $
+objnum, $gennum)'
        : ${$c} =~ m/ \G \[              /xms  ? 'parseArray(    $c, $
+objnum, $gennum)'
        : ${$c} =~ m/ \G [(]             /xms  ? 'parseString(   $c, $
+objnum, $gennum)'
        : ${$c} =~ m/ \G <               /xms  ? 'parseHexString($c, $
+objnum, $gennum)'
        : ${$c} =~ m/ \G [\d.+-]+        /xms  ? 'parseNum(      $c, $
+objnum, $gennum)'
        : ${$c} =~ m/ \G (true|false)    /ixms ? 'parseBoolean(  $c, $
+objnum, $gennum)'
        : ${$c} =~ m/ \G null            /ixms ? 'parseNull(     $c, $
+objnum, $gennum)'
        : die "Unrecognized type in parseAny\n";
}
[download]

I think the best approach would be a tokenizer that takes the first character and decides from that what to do. This would mean rewriting the regex into something really unreadable like:

sub parseAny_token
{
   #my $p      = shift;  # pkg or doc
   my $c      = shift;
   #my $objnum = shift;
   #my $gennum = shift;
 
   my $ch = m{ \G (?:
               ([0-9]+)
              |(/)
              |(<<)
              |(\[)
              |\([.+-])
              |(true|false)
              |(null) }xmsi
   } or die "Unrecognized type in parseAny\n";

   # now dispatch based on $1 etc:
   if( defined $1 ) {
       my $num = $1;
       if( m/\G\s+\d+\s+R\b/ ) {
           # Handle $num $num $
           parseRef(      $c, $objnum, $gennum)
       } elsif( m/\G([-+.\d+])/ ) {
           # handle "$num$1"
           "$num$1
           parseNum(      $c, $objnum, $gennum)
       } else {
           # handle "$num"
       };
   } elsif( defined $2 ) { # /
       parseLabel(    $c, $objnum, $gennum)
   }
   ...
}
[download]

That would need a lot of good unit tests to make sure the grammar rewrite still works and especially still picks up parsing at the right places when something like a +R comes in the input stream.

In my toy implementation for the tokenizer, I get 90% of the performance of the original R case for both cases. Maybe it would be worth to share your problematic PDF with the author of CAM::PDF (or me) if you can, just to see whether it can be turned into a good test case...

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