Thanks for all your comments.

After reading the posts - especially the benchmarks, it seems that the code is not as bad as I thought. However just by looking at it once again and looking at the "80% speedup" for the level 0 case, I came with 2 improvements: 

sub get_proparg {
  my $propstr = shift;                     # get the property string
  my $level   = shift || return $propstr;  # get the level we want to 
+extract
  my $cnt;                                 # initialize counter

  if($level == -1) {           # special case, get the innermost argum
+ent
    $propstr =~ /\(([^\(\)]+)\)+/;
    return $1;
  } else {                     # get whatever argument $level indicate
+s
    for($cnt = 0;$cnt<$level; $cnt++) {
      $propstr =~ /\((.+)\)/;
      $propstr = $1;
    }
    return $propstr;
  }
}

[download]
Should perform slightly better now, esp. for the level 0 case (which unfortunatedly is rare).

Bye
 PetaMem     All Perl:   MT, NLP, NLU

In reply to Re: Peeling the Peelings by PetaMem
in thread Peeling the Peelings by PetaMem

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