Boosting performance of regular expressions

Billy Buchanan
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Billy Buchanan: SAG Corporation

2025 Stata Conference from Stata Users Group

Abstract: If all you have are the original Stata regular expression functions in your toolkit, all text data can look like a nightmare. Even with better regular expression functions, the lack of high- quality documentation, guides, and examples makes it more difficult to use regular expressions effectively. Have you ever wondered about the differences between possessive and greedy expressions? Have you ever wondered how to use positive and negative look-ahead and look-behind functionality? Do you find some commands using regular expressions taking much longer to execute than you would like? If so, this is the talk for you. During the talk, I will explain how regular expressions work, and what the different metacharacters, matching types, look-arounds, and different character classes do, describe how to improve the performance of your regular expressions, and describe misconceptions along the way.

Date: 2025-08-08
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boc:usug25:05

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