Use Benchmark when in doubt. YMMV. The first thing I would do for speeding that up is adding a + after the character class, but below proves I'm wrong.

$ cat test.pl
#!/pro/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Benchmark "cmpthese";

my $string  = pack "A*" => map { chr (32 + int rand 95) } 0..1280;

cmpthese (-1, {
    subsingle   => '(my $s = $string) =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]//g',
    subplus     => '(my $s = $string) =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]+//g',
    tran        => '(my $s = $string) =~ tr/a-zA-Z0-9 _-//cd',
    });
$ perl5.8.8 test.pl
               Rate      tran   subplus subsingle
tran      5938537/s        --       -1%       -2%
subplus   5983722/s        1%        --       -1%
subsingle 6052802/s        2%        1%        --
$ perl5.10.1 test.pl
               Rate      tran   subplus subsingle
tran      5242880/s        --       -2%       -5%
subplus   5344683/s        2%        --       -3%
subsingle 5531478/s        6%        3%        --
$ perl5.12.3 test.pl
               Rate      tran   subplus subsingle
tran      5044286/s        --       -2%       -4%
subplus   5144881/s        2%        --       -2%
subsingle 5242880/s        4%        2%        --
$ perl5.14.1 test.pl
               Rate      tran   subplus subsingle
tran      5144881/s        --       -9%      -10%
subplus   5663605/s       10%        --       -1%
subsingle 5716536/s       11%        1%        --
$

[download]

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

In reply to Re^2: Remove all non alphanumeric characters excluding space, underscore and minus sign by Tux
in thread Remove all non alphanumeric characters excluding space, underscore and minus sign by ikkeniet

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