Re: Documentation on debugging regexp performance

["Clément Pit--Claudel" <clement.pit@gmail.com>]

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On 01/21/2016 10:27 AM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Hello, Clément.

Hi Alan!

> "   +[^:=]+ +:=?" is an ill-formed regexp - if you get lots of spaces in
> a non-match, the Emacs regexp engine will try all possible ways of
> matching these spaces before giving up.  You have three concatenated
> sub-expressions, all of which match any number of spaces, namely:
> 
>    " +[^:=]+ +"
>     1122222233
> 
> I would suggest reformulating it thus:
> 
>    " +[^:= ][^:=]+ "
>     112222223333334

I think this has different semantics: my original regexp requires at least three spaces. But I think prepending spaces to yours fixes that.

> 
> Subexpression 1 matches ALL the leading spaces.
> Subexp 2 is exactly one
> character which can't be a space.  Subexp 3 matches almost anything,
> including spaces, and subexp 4 matches a single space at the end (to make
> sure there is at least one space there).

This is helpful, thanks! I realize however that maybe I oversimplified. The issue is that what I really want is something like this:

"   +\\([^:=]+\\) +:=?"

IOW, I want to capture that first group.

> All the best with your regexp!

Thanks. Your points about backtracking were helpful as well. Do you know if there are technical reasons why Emacs chooses a backtracking implementation for this regexp (instead of compiling it to a linear-time matcher)?

Clément.


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