This is a good article explaining what happens inside the RE engine. Take what you have vs other answers and see what the RE engine would do with them. Also add the fact that the other answers looked for a match, and didn't do a substitution (which isn't needed in this case).

And is this inefficiency lost in the noise of overall execution times

No.. it could make the execution time longer. If you ran that match against 10_000 lines, it would produce it's own noise.. compared to the other solutions.

I'm not trying to come down on ya :) Read that article, read perlre, and Mastering Regular Expressions. Then, practice working with REs. I bet in a few weeks you would look at this and say "I am now so much wiser!" :)

Cheers,
KM

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.