Parsing an Apache logfile. Yes, I know that there is such a thing as Apache::ParseLog but since it's OO, I have efficiency worries and anyhow, the real point of this question is for me to hone some regex skills if possible. The problem: my current method looks like this: 

while (<LOGFILE>) {
    my $hit = parse_line($_);
    #do a bunch of stuff with the hashref, like
    # insert it into a DB.
}

sub parse_line {
    my $line = shift;
    if ($line =~ /^(\S+).*?\[(\S+).*?] (\S+) "([^"]+)" (\d+)/) {
                return {host_ip=>$1,
                        timestamp=>$2,
                        vhost=>$3,
                        request=>$4,
                        HTTP_CODE=>$5
                };
    # and some stuff to handle errors, that needn't bother us
}

[download]
The problem is that (l)users are sometimes entering something silly into their location windows, such as
"http://www.foo.edu"
(that's right, quotes and all; which, as you can see, messes with my regex, specifically, the parens associated with the fourth and fifth match variables.)

Now I *can* throw them away, and given that these files are taking hours to process (the DB inserts take a while), I'd like to know whether it's worth my while to attempt to handle the silly URLS or whether I should just forget about them as this sub processes over 2 million lines a run and I'd like to make it as lean as possible. How expensive in terms of processing time would it be to craft a smarter regex?

yes, I will deal with that dot-star in there ...

Sample goofy line from log 1.2.3.4 - - [10/Oct/2000:00:19:13 -0400] www.foo.edu "GET /"http://www.TheCounter.com/" HTTP/1.1" 404 2925 i.e. ipaddress, username, realm, timestamp, virtual host name, "request string", http code

Philosophy can be made out of anything -- or less

In reply to Crafting a regex by arturo

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