Why is pattern-matching of NULs slow?

Roger L Costello costello at mitre.org
Fri Apr 8 06:22:42 CDT 2022


Hi Folks,

"Flex" is a tool for tokenizing a string. The Flex manual says this:

    Pattern-matching of NULs is substantially slower
    than matching other characters.

Is this peculiar to Flex or is pattern-matching NULs slow in all pattern-matching tools?

Why would pattern-matching NULs be slower than pattern-matching other characters?

/Roger



More information about the Unicode mailing list