I had the same thought, but unless I am doing something dumb (quite likely:), then strangely it seems that unpack is slower than even the explicit regex?

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Benchmark qw[ cmpthese ];

our @data = map{ 
    join' ', '2004-05-13', '14:02:00', ('blah') x (1+rand( 9 )) 
} 1 .. 1000;

cmpthese( -1, {
    greedy => q[
        my( $date, $time, $text );
        
        m[(^\S*)\s(\S*)\s(.*$)]
            and ( $date, $time, $text ) = ( $1, $2, $3 )
#            and print "greedy: $date|$time|$text"
            for @data;
    ],
    explicit => q[
        my( $date, $time, $text );
        
        m[(^\d{4}\-\d{2}\-\d{2})\s(\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2})\s(.*$)]
            and ( $date, $time, $text ) = ( $1, $2, $3 )
#            and print "explicit: $date|$time|$text"
            for @data;
    ],
    unpack => q[
        my( $date, $time, $text );

        ( $date, $time, $text ) = unpack 'A10 x A8 x A*', $_
#            and print "unpack: $date|$time|$text"
            for @data;
    ],
});
    
__END__
P:\test>362106
          Rate   unpack explicit   greedy
unpack   158/s       --     -41%     -53%
explicit 267/s      70%       --     -21%
greedy   338/s     114%      26%       --
[download]

What stupidity am I guilty of?