Looping will be slower? According to simonm, matching multiple times is faster than a single super-match. Only a benchmark of actual data will show for sure, but I've seen it said on PM many times already that multiple smaller matches are faster than single larger-matches. I'm presuming that simpler FSMs combined with less ability to backtrack has something to do with it. I'm not entirely sure, though.

In reply to Re^2: pattern matching with large regex by Tanktalus
in thread pattern matching with large regex by Anonymous Monk

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