I program in C mainly. Recently I have revisiting perllooking at other people's scripts and was starting to notice how common it is to have many (10 or so) of the 
$acertainvariable =~ s/regex/replacement/g;
idiom all following each other in the code. The $acertainvariable doesn't change.

is there a performance issue here? I mean, shouldn't an if or switch(or perl equivalent) statement be used? The number of match attempt can clearly be reduced that way.

Now many of these are simple utility scripts, so it mightn't matter ... dunno, it just struck me.

Thank you JavaFan, roboticus and cdarke for your replies. I'm clear about ~= now

In reply to SOLVED: performance of repeated "$samevareachtime=~ s/etc/etc" idiom by stabu

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.