yes I have a typo in the post. It shoud be ^\s, but that still doesn't give me an answer.
If you fix that typo and then run Benchmarks, I think you will see that they are about the same speed. I see speed differences of 0-3% with the typo fixed, and 20-25% with the typo in place.... probably because some optimization is possible when the regex says "beginning of string" and not '^' in an arbitrary place in the string.

In reply to Re^3: question about reg exp engine by broomduster
in thread question about reg exp engine by chuckd

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