[Purdue-pm] Missed Presentation

Andy Lester andy at petdance.com
Wed Apr 11 10:28:47 PDT 2007


On Apr 11, 2007, at 11:41 AM, Mark Senn wrote:

>     o  Right after some of these common cases were eliminated from $_
>        a "study" command was done to (probably) make the rest of the
>        ~2000 regexes run faster.

study is not helpful in the vast majority of cases.  All it does is  
make a table of where the first occurrence of each of 256 bytes is in  
the string.  This means that if you have a 1,000-character string,  
and you search for lots of strings that begin with a constant  
character, then the matcher can jump right to it.  For example:

"This is a very long [... 900 characters skipped...] string that I  
have here, ending at position 1000"

Now, if you are matching this against the regex /Icky/, the matcher  
will try to find the first letter "I" that matches.  That may take  
scanning through the first 900+ characters until you get to it.  But  
what study does is build a table of the 256 possible bytes and where  
they first appear, so that in this case, the scanner can jump right  
to that position and start matching.



--
Andy Lester => andy at petdance.com => www.petdance.com => AIM:petdance






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