Barry Warsaw writes:
IBan would need to have a flag which indicate whether the
patternwould be fine, with the understanding that is_regexp=False means the pattern is a literal).
Are regexps sufficiently slow that *always* using a regexp would hurt performance?[1] The model I really had in mind was to always use regexps, and have a flag in the UI (Postorius) to regexp-quote when the user wants a literal.
Or we could continue to have the core representation be "leading '^' iff regexp", and once again have Postorius prepend "^.*" or whatever.
Footnotes: [1] XEmacs actually checks whether a regexp contains any regexp operators and automatically switches to a very fast literal search if not.