consolidate regexes

[Dirk Koopman]

I am looking at an application where some incoming string needs to be 
compared to many (certainly 10s, probably 100s but not 1000s) regexes. 
This being a message passing application, speed is more important than 
it might otherwise be. The list of regexes is single exit simple ladder 
logic (i.e. the first match exits the list and is dealt with by the 
associated function).

I am wondering whether there is some regex consolidation possible that 
turns the regex list into some single mega regex or a more formal state 
machine driven thingy.

Dirk