substr vs regex

[Aaron Crane]

alex at owal.co.uk writes:
> Imagine, say, someone wanted the last three characters of a
> string. They might use a regex /(...)$/ or substr($variable, -3)

Note that those aren't actually equivalent:

  $ cat foo.pl
  sub show {
     my ($s) = @_;
     return "undef\n" if !defined $s;
     $s =~ s/\n/\\n/g;
     return ">>$s<<\n";
  }
  for ("foobar\n", "foobar\n\n") {
      my ($via_regex) = /(...)$/;
      my ($via_substr) = substr $_, -3;
      print "\ntarget:     ", show($_);
      print "via regex:  ", show($via_regex);
      print "via substr: ", show($via_substr);
  }
  $ perl foo.pl

  target:     >>foobar\n<<
  via regex:  >>bar<<
  via substr: >>ar\n<<

  target:     >>foobar\n\n<<
  via regex:  undef
  via substr: >>r\n\n<<

You can make them equivalent by adding the /m flag to the regex, and
using /\z/ instead of /$/.

> Is one of these significantly more efficient than the other?

I wouldn't worry about the efficiency anywhere near as much as the
readability.  And it's hard to say which is more readable without more
context about what your program's doing.

-- 
Aaron Crane