I'm puzzled and seek enlightenment about greedy regex. Here's a line from a log:

2004-05-13 14:02:00 blah blah

I found that a greedy regex used to parse the date time above such as: 

\S*\s*\S*

[download]

ran faster than a specific regex like this one: 

\d{4}\-\d{2}\-\d{2}\s\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}

[download]

Given, I have to write a perl script to parse 60GB of proxy logs, is it better/faster to use a greedy regex?

Also is there anything else I can do to speed up the parsing apart from using an optimised regex?

Thee has my thanks,

js1.

In reply to fast greedy regex by js1

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