[Python-Dev] Speeding up regular expression compilation

Skip Montanaro skip at pobox.com
Thu Oct 30 14:40:54 EST 2003


(better on python-list at python.org than here, btw)

    Bram> Is there a trick to make compiling patterns go faster?

Not really.  Note though that the sre module caches compiled regular
expressions.  How many it caches depends on the size of sre._MAXCACHE
(default is 100).  If you have many more regular expressions than that,
you'll spend a lot of time compiling them.  You might find it helpful to
boost that number.

If you're adventurous, you might investigate recasting the
sre_compile._compile function as C code.  If you use an Intel CPU, another
alternative might be to use psyco.

Skip




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