I wasn't implying that my perl version was faster than the C version. I think it is save to say that for every perl program, there is a C program that can perform the same task in less time.

I was stating that using index and substr where you can is almost always faster than using a regexp, so my index and substr version was faster than the join and split versions listed above. So I was comparing different perl implementations.

I guess I probably should have timed one of the split/join examples and included that, but I didn't know which one was the fastest. So I included the timing based on the C version of cut, which gives a baseline for anyone to compare against.

- Cees