What hurts in your case are the nested quantifiers, ie (.*<\/td>){9}. You might use (?>.*?<\/td>){9} instead, it's probably much faster, and what it does is closer to what you think it does.

That said, use a proper HTML parsing module from CPAN, and extract your desired information from the parse tree.

In reply to Re: Backtracking hurts: slow regexp by moritz
in thread Backtracking hurts: slow regexp by faibistes

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