[erlang-questions] Speeding up string matching

[James Hague]

> I think this trick will be useful for erlang starters. If not, gurus,
> please correct me :)

I discovered exactly the same trick in an XML parser I wrote earlier
this year.  Speed aside, it's much cleaner to separate the scanning
and result building, too.

At one time I had a fondness for the same style of code even with
lists.  Scan through the list, counting characters, then use
list:sublist/2 or lists:split/2 to get the result.  The nice thing
about this approach is that there's the opportunity to move thost
standard list functions to C code.  Or at least I thought this was
pretty at one time :)

James