I'm in the same boat just recently, only I knew about regular expressions but was intimidated by them. My first attempt used regular expressions, but got to a p

I'm in the same boat just recently, only I knew about regular expressions but was intimidated by them. My first attempt used regular expressions, but got to a point where I made faster progress rolling my own lexer. I was surprised at how much fast simple looping over characters were. It was about twice as fast as my regular expression implementation.