From: "Uri Yanover" uriyan_subscribe@yahoo.com
Well, while easiness of debugging is important, it is still possible to write a good parser that would be easy to debug;
Ok. If you say so. :-)
keeping it simple for as long as possible might lead to very hasty and ugly attempts to optimize when it's too late.
You don't know how ugly those attempts will be until you try (or let somebody else try).
In addition to that, the internal links check explodes the array which is expensive both in terms of passing again over the text and the added use of memory.
A good point, and indeed something that needs to be looked at. But you can avoid this also if you use the regular expressions approach.
[...] Be the PHP regexp performance as good as it can be, converting from one complicated markup (Wiki) to another (HTML) is simply not the task they were intended for.
When the original Wiki mark-up was designed it was done so as to be effeciently implementable by Perl regular expressions.
-- Jan Hidders