I'm not entirely sure why the regexes were so much slower, unless they just never could actually match. In that circumstance, /.*FAIL/ would be a lot slower than /^.*FAIL/.
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Jeff japhy Pinyan,
P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.:
Perl,
regex,
and perlhacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart