I do not believe you are gaining anything by the strategy you suggest in your problem.

The only part of the text you can safely throw away is any part which does not match any leading "fixed" characters in the regex, less the length of the "fixed" character string.

For example, looking for AB.*Z will only be able to (eat) throw away text until it encounters the first AB in the text, as from then on greedy matching means it must acquire all text until it encounters a Z, so even if the next Z is several million characters from the AB, the program must keep all of it, and run the search from that AB.

In summary, if you are finding searches slow, then you should perhaps be looking at doing the search less often, perhaps as a scheduled task or when the text grows by a set amount.

In reply to Re^4: Find Prefix if regex didn't match by space_monk
in thread Find Prefix if regex didn't match by demoralizer

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