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[Python-Dev] Speeding up regular expression compilation

Bram Moolenaar Bram at moolenaar.net
Fri Oct 31 06:20:44 EST 2003 
Barry Warsaw wrote:

> On Thu, 2003-10-30 at 14:40, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> > Not really.  Note though that the sre module caches compiled regular
> > expressions.  How many it caches depends on the size of sre._MAXCACHE
> > (default is 100).  If you have many more regular expressions than that,
> > you'll spend a lot of time compiling them.  You might find it helpful to
> > boost that number.
> 
> Of course you can just assign your compiled regular expression objects
> to a global or local and use that.  Instant caching!  Which is what I
> tend to do.

I'm already caching all the compiled patterns.  It's the first-time
compile that is consuming time, there are a lot of patterns.  But half a
second to compile them is too much, the whole program may not run longer
than a second.

BTW. I've changed the code to use pre.py on Python 2.3 (with the warning
removed) as a temporary solution.  The problem will be back with 2.4...

The reason I sent this to the development list is that I thought this
could be solved on the library side.  Changing the Python code sounds
like working around the real problem.

-- 
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