Thanks to everyone who replied. I'll post an update when I have final presentation notes

I'll be using corrections from Anonymous Monk and ovid to the perl version of the function and broquaint's version of the C function with corrections by dominus and abstracts

Time permitting, I'll do up a Flex and Bison version and a pcre (perl compatible regular expressions) version. Juerd makes the good point that it would be fairer to compare a C regex to a perl regex solution. However, my preliminary research and very small experience suggest C regexs have a fair amount of overhead that wouldn't be recovered in my toy project.

Juerd will no doubt produce elegant, working code and correct me if I er but...

• Allocate Memory
• Compile the Regular Expression
• Execute the regular expression
• Play w/ a special substr function, a loop and maybe some strcat()

• Build a .l file
• Build a .y file (or write a concat loop in C ??)
• Run Flex
• Run Yacc

Time permitting, I'll also do an "ugly" version in Perl (thanks belg4mit)

A couple other thoughts. It took me about 5 hours to write the C version of the function and about 50 minutes to write the Perl version of the function. At no time, during my perl coding did I dump core... My perl version was much closer to the more ideal perl version created by ovid than the more ideal C version created by broquaint

My guess is that as a average Perl & C programmer, I'm closer to being a great perl programmer than I am to being a great C programmer. (not that I'm especially close...)