Hi jaytea,
I had been looking at some posts about regular expressions that were made in your name, and I'll definitely have to read your reply again when I'm more awake and comment on it.
( Apparently the 'watched topics' isn't actually e-mailing me - I'll have to check my settings. )
In the mean time, I did identify that I had some misconceptions about scripting and execution time for some things that seem ingrained in scripting as being 'the way to do it' (but not focused on speed, clearly), so I'm shaving away at what I've got and doing speed tests (wrote a little alias that runs a few tests a few thousand times, then scales up the number of loops to give me a more statistically significant number of tests (~10s per test)... fun things to find out that way.
Just to note specifically the hash table vs ini thing.. the part where a hash table seems to fall apart is that its storage is 3 levels deep without trickery, while inis are 4 levels.
Which means that if I have e.g. [tr id='#something][td]text[/td][/tr]
If I want to store things in an ini, I would get:
(somefile.ini)
[tr]
id=something
[tr][td]
&content=text
While if I had a hash table, I would have to use trickery...
htmlhashtable - tr.id - something
htmlhashtable - tr-td.&content - text
That trickery of concatenation $+(...) is what ends up affecting performance quite a bit.
Alternatively, I'd be creating one hash table per element. I haven't tested that in terms of performance, but surely that's not the way to go
But maybe there's some other trick there. For now I'd like to finish the shaving, and going over your post's notes re: use of regexes. The ini vs hash thing is a lot easier to swap out than the other things
