Is regex too slow? Real life examples where simple non-regex alternative is better

Posted by polygenelubricants on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by polygenelubricants
Published on 2010-04-19T11:41:24Z Indexed on 2010/04/19 11:43 UTC
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I've seen people here made comments like "regex is too slow!", or "why would you do something so simple using regex!" (and then present a 10+ lines alternative instead), etc.

I haven't really used regex in industrial setting, so I'm curious if there are applications where regex is demonstratably just too slow, AND where a simple non-regex alternative exists that performs significantly (maybe even asymptotically!) better.

Obviously many highly-specialized string manipulations with sophisticated string algorithms will outperform regex easily, but I'm talking about cases where a simple solution exists and significantly outperforms regex.

What counts as simple is subjective, of course, but I think a reasonable standard is that if it uses only String, StringBuilder, etc, then it's probably simple.

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