mirod said:
Can't you just use any character (here the space) to delimit a regexp?
That's not happening here: 
print "Good\n" if $test =~ ab;

[download]
There is no space to the right of the regex. If anything, it would be a word boundary as the delimeter (\b in a regex). This appears to be, as merlyn mentioned, a bareword being promoted to a string and then to a regex.

mirod said:

This code actually does not pass -w and use strict on my Solaris/Perl 5.6 combo.

Are you sure ab is not pre-compiled or some similar trickery?

Nope, it's not precompiled. I just got home (I'm home early due to being sick as a dog. Don't lick my posts, I wouldn't want you to get ill) and tried it on my Win98 box and again, it runs fine.

Naturally, I'm curious as to the performance aspects, so I decided to benchmark this. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Benchmark;

my $test;
#print "Good\n" if $test =~ ab;

timethese(-15, {
    bare      => '$test = "aba"; $test =~ ab',
    delimited => '$test = "aba"; $test =~ /ab/'
});

[download]
Whups! All of a sudden, I get a whole slew of messages like the following: 
Unquoted string "ab" may clash with future reserved word at (eval 1) l
+ine 1.

[download]
Somehow, eval is catching the problem. By removing the -w switch, the code ran fine (but still works with strict, go figure).

Incidentally, the benchmark results showed no significant performance impact: 

Benchmark: running bare, delimited, each for at least 15 CPU seconds..
+.
      bare: 13 wallclock secs (15.01 usr +  0.00 sys = 15.01 CPU) @ 45
+7834.84/s (n=6872101)
 delimited: 16 wallclock secs (15.00 usr +  0.00 sys = 15.00 CPU) @ 45
+8124.53/s (n=6871868)

[download]
I want to explore this more and see just how complicated of a regex I can make here, but I need to get some sleep.

Cheers,
Ovid

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In reply to (Ovid - benchmarking a bare regex) RE: Odd... by Ovid
in thread Odd... by Ovid

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