question about speed of sequential string replacement vs regex or

[Willem]

Xah Lee wrote:
) the question originally came from when i was coding elisp of a
) function that changes html entities to unicode char literal. The
) problem is slightly complicated, involving a few questions about speed
) in emacs. e.g. string vs buffer, and much more... i spent several
) hours on this but it's probably too boring to detail (but i'll do so
) if anyone wishes). But anyway, while digging these questions that's
) not clear in my mind, i thought of why not generate a regex or
) construct and do it in one shot, and wondered if that'd be faster. But
) afterwards, i realized this wouldn't be applicable to my problem
) because for my problem each string needs to be changed to a unique
) string, not all to the same string.

In Perl, it would be applicable.  You see, in Perl, you can call a function
in the replacement of the regex substitution, which can then look up the
html entity and return the wanted unicode literal.

I think you can do that in some other languages as well.


SaSW, Willem
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