question about speed of sequential string replacement vs regex or

[Eli the Bearded]

In comp.lang.perl.misc, Willem  <willem at toad.stack.nl> wrote:
> 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.

A function? I'd use a hash.

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

Hash / array type substitutions indexed by $1 (or language equivilent)
are probably easy to implement in many languages.

Elijah
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for really fast, write code to generate a C lexer to do it