First of all, you misunderstood my OP, I wasn't comparing speed. For what I am doing, and for lots of other things, as long as there is a fair speed, either language is viable.

My point is that, since Java supports regex with no performance drawback, perl cannot win regex argument any more - meaning perl loses one of its strength - or to be more precise, what was perl's strength along is now shared by many other languages including java.