And the regex engine is amazingly fast (there is one faster I believe). Try throwing a 20,000 item list at this little program, and then use the resulting rege

And the regex engine is amazingly fast (there is one faster I believe). Try throwing a 20,000 item list at this little program, and then use the resulting regex to match another 20,000 items and see how long it runs (hint: not very, considering): #!/usr/bin/env perl use warnings; use strict; use Regexp::Assemble; my $ra = Regexp::Assemble->new; while (<>) { chomp; $ra->add($_); } print $ra->re . "\n";