I know that gryng has stated that regex is faster than a split for long lines. However, his test case was $testlarge = "a " x 100000;. That's a two-hundred thousand character line. I'm highly inclined to doubt that most people are going to be working with lines of that length. In the real world (no offense to gryng intended), where we're not splitting one hundred thousand repetitions of "a ", we usually use much smaller chunks of data. For those, split is probably the best best.

You might want to consider using Benchmark to figure out what works best. I looked at your regex and realized that after you added the capturing parens and assigned the $digit variables, you were looking at a significant performance hit. You can use Benchmark to analyze these things a bit more carefully. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Benchmark;
use vars qw($myvar @results $a $b $c $d);
$myvar = "one,two,three,four";

timethese(1000000, { 
    Regex => '($a=$1, $b=$2, $c=$3, $d=$4) if $myvar   =~ /^([^,]+),([
+^,]+),([^,]+),([^,]+)$/',
    Split => '@results = split /,/, $myvar'
});

[download]
This produced: 
Benchmark: timing 1000000 iterations of Regex, Split...
     Regex: 27 wallclock secs (28.06 usr +  0.00 sys = 28.06 CPU)
     Split: 16 wallclock secs (16.19 usr +  0.00 sys = 16.19 CPU)

[download]
In this case, split was clearly the winner. I'd be interested in seeing some sample data and a code snippet to see how you're getting a regex to outperform a split. The structure of the data is everything when it comes to crafting an efficient regex.

Cheers,
Ovid

In reply to (Ovid) RE: From one beginner to others . . . by Ovid
in thread From one beginner to others . . . by greenhorn

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