Like others, I immediately reach for (split)[n] in a situation like this, so I thought I'd benchmark that against the other ideas offered in this thread. split was more than twice as fast as a regex, which wasn't a surprise, but johngg's combination of substr and rindex stomped it. The first run below used the sample string given by the OP, and then I ran it again using a string 32 times as long (with 32 times the delimiters). The substr/rindex solution only gets better with length. Have to remember that one! 

# with a short string
regex it  520833/s       --     -56%     -88%
split it 1176471/s     126%       --     -73%
index it 4347826/s     735%     270%       --

# with a long string
              Rate regex it split it index it
regex it   20053/s       --     -68%    -100%
split it   62004/s     209%       --     -99%
index it 4784689/s   23761%    7617%       --

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Aaron B.
Available for small or large Perl jobs; see my home node.

In reply to Re: Simple way to split on last match? by aaron_baugher
in thread Simple way to split on last match? by aturtle

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