DanTMan wrote:
So to cut down on that, I'm going to try using normal string functions to pull out the prefixes and trim them off. A strpos, substr, and trim set together is much quicker than a full blown regex pattern match.
Not always. Remember that the PHP code surrounding that functions is interpreted, while the regex call is run on compiled code. I think some of the sysadmins remarked that the use of regex *improved* the perfomance. I'm not saying you shouldn't change it to traditional means, just that time should be checked to be sure it's not slower.