in reply to Re^2: Configurable Matches
in thread Configurable Matches

Well, you hit the pro on the head... it's much easier to interpolate variables into m//.

There is a major con, though. If you plan on using this regular expression in a loop, it will need to be recompiled every time it is used. With qr//, you will only compile once... You may want to benchmark them to find out the difference:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w use Benchmark; my $txt = 'find this regex'; my $str = 'regex?'; my $rgx = qr/$str/i; timethese ( 1000000, { match => sub{ $txt =~ m/$str/i }, qreg => sub{ $txt =~ $rgx }, }, );

Gives me the following:

% test.pl Benchmark: timing 1000000 iterations of match, qreg... match: 1 wallclock secs ( 0.82 usr + 0.00 sys = 0.82 CPU) @ 12 +19512.20/s (n=1000000) qreg: 0 wallclock secs ( 0.73 usr + 0.00 sys = 0.73 CPU) @ 13 +69863.01/s (n=1000000)

As you can see, for a regex this simple, it doesn't matter too much... but more complicated regexs wll show a bigger difference.