Problems that *could* be done with substr, but are not trivial as in your example. Also, "superior" ne "purely faster".

If it requires loops and ifs around the substr, it is surely faster to write and debug. Execution would depend on how much and how fancy you need to be. The OP problem, for example, is nearly trivial with a regex, but you'd have to pay me money to write as a set of substr()s.

"Usually" is certainly debatable, and I expect that it strongly depends on your environment. Personally, my code has a ratio of maybe 1:99 substr:regex. Filtering to what could plausibly be done with a set of substr, I'd guess it could be brought up to about 50/50, but the code would be horrendously brittle and scary. And I'm pretty sure my implementation of the search and matching would not be as fast as the regex engine.

If you are always dealing with fixed width field data, substr becomes more useful and common.

In reply to Re^3: extra spaces between the characters in string by SuicideJunkie
in thread extra spaces between the characters in string by harshashende

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.