As I understand it, that would still do backtracking, right? Try to match the first one; if it fails, backtrack and try to match the alternative.

Another challenge here is that the initial characters are optional. Maybe if I write things out fully it becomes easier to optimize. I'll meditate on that. In that case, it might look like

my $number = qr{
   \b\d+
   | \b\d+\.\d+\
   | \b\.\d+
   ....
}x;

[download]

But it already looks like I'm introducing backtracking again. My gut feeling is that I can write a state machine for this that doesn't need to do backtracking. Hmmm :-\

In reply to Re^2: In search of an efficient query abstractor by xaprb
in thread In search of an efficient query abstractor by xaprb

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