Actually, I looked at the code to make some changes to my private language file and didn't understand it. I know somehow what the code does but not how, because I didn't want to spend that much time decoding all those regexps that make the code pretty cryptic and hard to maintain - with the added bonus of not having /any/ documentation.

In case anyone's wondering, yes the code is in CVS now. But it's not finished: there's still at least one more update to Language.php to come. Sorry about that Jens but you'd probably be better off commenting the whole section out for now. As for not having any documentation, I can fix that in my next commit.

Why not rearrange the code into two segments: Segment one would parse the linked date like present in the article into three numerical values: day, month, year. The second segment then would only have to concat those values (maybe with a converted month name) into the final form. This form could be given in the usual "$1 $2 $3 $4" syntax (with e.g. $4 being the month name). That also would take some load off the server that now has to interpret lots of regexp patterns, which isn't too cheap because these patterns normally first get converted into some form of a finite automaton that is eventually given the input string for processing. (At least the code by Tatu Ylonen proceeds in this way.)

No, I think your way would be slower, not faster. There's a "pre-analysis" flag you're meant to use if you run the same regular expression many times, but according to the PHP manual it only provides a speedup if the regular expression starts with something other than a fixed character. So it sounds like there's no compilation. Besides, if regular expressions were slow, well, the rest of the parser would be in trouble.

By splitting the replacing from the parsing, you're just turning one job into two. The same tasks are still required, there's just some extra administrative overhead. Plus since PHP is an interpretive language, I'd really rather have the O(N) code written in C.

As for your way being simpler, well, I would contest that too. You code it your way, and we'll put them side by side. My way really is pretty simple if you understand Perl regular expressions.

-- Tim Starling.

_________________________________________________________________ Hotmail is now available on Australian mobile phones. Go to http://ninemsn.com.au/mobilecentral/signup.asp