Re: how to post a question?

Ryan A wrote:

Hey Rich,

The str_replace calls are kinda expensive IMHO, a good regex would be better

I'd be interested to see a benchmark (any benchmark) where str_replace is SLOWER than the corresponding Regex...

I am not very good with RegEx's myself, and I have never benchmarked any of them but I was told or read (when i first started learning php) that using multiple str_replace()s are not a good idea and to use a regex instead. (Thats why I wrote the "IMHO",if i was wrong one of the gurus here could correct me) It kind of makes sense, for example using this from the php site: $phrase = "You should eat fruits, vegetables, and fiber every day."; $healthy = array("fruits", "vegetables", "fiber"); $yummy = array("pizza", "beer", "ice cream"); $newphrase = str_replace($healthy, $yummy, $phrase); in the above, first it searches the entire phrase for the first parameter (fruits) then it starts again fro the second parameter (vegetables) etc, if you have a really long text it could be quite process intensive....because it would have to go through the whole text searching for the parameters one by one....right? You're the guy who usually helps me (and a whole lot of others) when we have questions

isn't he just! :-) I have to wonder how long his keyboards last ;-), or whether he retro-fits them with smoke alarms (speedtyping -> overheating -> fire)

so I am really interested on your view on this, and why your view favours one side more than the other.

regexps require a complete engine (in the same way as PHP is a engine) in order to be parsed. loading/initializing such an engine is heavier than doing a 'simple' search and replace action.... performance results (between str_replace() and pre_replace()) will definitely be skewed when comparing simple regexps against a comparable str_replace() because (to start with) the overhead of calling a function in php (which is why its better to call str_replace() with arrays in param 1 and 2 rather than calling str_replace() multiple times) ...also sporadic CPU load due to totally unrelated processes (even when running on your local machine) can totally skew a benchmark test. I think you can trust Richard on this one! and if you don't ... :-) ... then I bet you a beer he'd say "we'll then, why not test it and see!"

Cheers, Ryan