I replied elsewhere, but to answer more concisely: that's exactly what "regular language" / automata-based engines do, as opposed to Perl-style backtracking eng

I replied elsewhere, but to answer more concisely: that's exactly what "regular language" / automata-based engines do, as opposed to Perl-style backtracking engines (which are more common). Here are hundreds of regexes OR'd together so the lexer reads the input exactly once, not 100 times: https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.8.pre6/source-code.wwz/_devbuild/tmp/osh-lex.re2c.h https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.8.pre6/source-code.wwz/_d... And in the lobste.rs thread linked below, I was basically saying for all practical purposes you can ignore Aho-Corasick and use the more general regex version. Since the "fgrep problem" (fixed strings) problem doesn't involve captures, you should get a DFA that runs at the same speed either way. (I don't recall if the compile time was longer but I don't think so, it is buried in the thread probably :) ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23665569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23665569