I think part of the inefficiency is that you're running multiple regular expressions over your code. You could roll all these regular expressions into one regular expression, at least that's easy as long as the first character of any candidate match is different between all regular expressions:

my $re_num = qr{
              [+-]?
              (?:
                \d+
                (?:[.]\d*)?
                |[.]\d+
              )
              (?:e[+-]?\d+)?
              \b
             }x;                             # Float/real into N
my $re_hexbin = qr{\b0(?:x[0-9a-f]+|b[01]+)\b};  # Hex/bin into N
my $num_combined = qr{ $re_num | $re_hexbin };

$query =~ s/$num_combined/N/g;

[download]

If you want to replace both, strings and numbers in one go, you'll have to combine the regular expressions as above but capture into (say) $1 for numbers and into $2 for strings and then replace with S or N whether $1 or $2 is defined.

In reply to Re: In search of an efficient query abstractor by Corion
in thread In search of an efficient query abstractor by xaprb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.