Re^2: How do I optimize a regular expression?

[kyle]

You're correct about my poor man's comments. I didn't know about (?# ... ) comments or I'd have used that. Thanks!

To split on white space might be a good idea for this application, and I may try that, but I'm more interested in how to make expressions work faster.

I don't really understand how backtracking works, so I don't know when (?> ... ) can be used. I probably ought to spend a day in perlre or something.

I'm actually doing my development with Perl 5.10, but the machine it ultimately has to run on has only 5.8.8. Now I'm really wondering how hard it would be to upgrade it.

Thanks for your help!