Perl Cookbook

Speeding Up Interpolated Matches

Problem

You want your function or program to take one or more regular expressions as arguments, but doing so seems to run slower than using literals.

Solution

To overcome this bottleneck, if you have only one pattern whose value won’t change during the entire run of a program, store it in a string and use /$pattern/o.

while ($line = <>) {
    if ($line =~ /$pattern/o) {
        # do something
    }
}

If you have more than one pattern, however, that won’t work. Use one of the three techniques outlined in the Discussion for a speed-up of an order of magnitude or so.

Discussion

When Perl compiles a program, it converts patterns into an internal form. This conversion occurs at compile time for patterns without variables in them, but at run time for those that do contain variables. That means that interpolating variables into patterns, as in /$pattern/, can slow your program down. This is particularly noticeable when $pattern changes often.

The /o modifier is a promise from the script’s author that the values of any variables interpolated into that pattern will not change—or that if they do, Perl should disregard any such changes. Given such a promise, Perl need only interpolate the variable and compile the pattern the first time it encounters the match. But if the interpolated variable were to change, Perl wouldn’t notice. Make sure to use it only on unchanging variables, or else wrong answers will result.

Using /o on patterns without interpolated variables does not speed ...