4 Nov 2000

Sat, 4 Nov 2000 06:45:22 GMT

Whoo hoo. People know me here. That's nice. :).

Rather than post an article, I'm going to diarize my diatribe. I'm working on a paper for the next Perl conference in California, TPC 5.0. It's basically on a whole new regular expression paradigm, that would theoretically work for any dialect of regexes. The concept is simple. Matching variable-width things at the END of a string is not efficient -- reverse the string and the idea of the regex, and you have a much faster process.

The simplest example is matching the last sequence of digits in a string. With a regex like (\d+)\D*$, the engine will find EACH occurrence of \d+, and fail for EACH occurrence but the last one. This is a lot of failure for a long string. So, reverse the input string. Reverse the sense of the regex to ^\D*(\d+). Then, reverse the sequence that matches.

I've developed a module for reversing many simple regular expressions, in Perl. What would be nice is an optimizer, since in ^\D*(\d+), the ^ and \D* are totally extraneous.

Anyway, it's cool, fun, efficient, and writing the parser helped me understand how less sleep makes regular expressions make more sense. ;)

Advogato blog for japhy

4 Nov 2000