When to use equality operator over binding operator

Question

recently I have become friendly with regular expressions and used them to over come a number of tasks very efficiently. As with most perl TIMTOWTDI has clouded my judgement. There are times I can use equality operator or binding operator. However are there times where it is more appropriate to use one over the other?

Firstly the simplified case

my $name = 'Chris';
if ($name eq 'Chris') { print 'What a great name!'; }
if ($name =~/^Chris$/) { print 'Yip sure is a great name; }

So in this case this is the most simplified, where using the equality is less typing, however in this simplified example is there any benefit to one or the other.

In a slightly more complex example

my $name = 'Christopher';
if ($name eq 'Chris' || $name eq 'Christopher') { print 'What a great name!'; }
if ($name =~ /^Chris(?:topher)?$/) { print 'Yip sure is a great name; }

here the binding operator is less typing. However I am not sure of the benefit either may hold over the other.

So is the general rule if you are matching an entire string with a fixed value to use equality operator and if your matching a string with a pattern for example any 5 digits string /\d{5}/ then use binding operator.

Is it inappropriate to use binding operator in the above examples. I appreciate that these examples are just made up and may not reflect a real life problem. However they were the ones i thought of to try to explain my question.

Answer 1

however in this simplified example is there any benefit to one or the other.

Well, they're not equivalent. /^Chris$/ matches Chris and Chris followed by a newline.

If you had used an equivalent pattern (/^Chris\z/), the difference would have been performance. A single string comparison will be faster than a regex match. It's also clearer.

For more complicated comparisons, you generally want to go with what's simpler, clearer, and more maintainable. Address performance (by using profile and running benchmarks) when it becomes an issue.

Answer 2

I would expect slightly (if at all) better performance from the eq operator because the regular expression might require a compilation phase as well as analysis before coming up with its determination.

So in the case:

if ($name eq 'Chris') { print 'What a great name!'; }
if ($name =~/^Chris$/) { print 'Yip sure is a great name; }

... I would expect the first statement to be fastest.

In the second example, however, you have to consider the summed times of the failed cases where you've provided a logical OR:

if ($name eq 'Chris' || $name eq 'Christopher') { print 'What a great name!'; }
if ($name =~ /^Chris(?:topher)?$/) { print 'Yip sure is a great name; }

... here things are less cut and dried. Sure, eq may be faster, but are two eqs faster than a regular expression which doesn't have to backtrack (in this example)? I can't be so sure.

Usually you won't have to consider the performance benefits. So you can't argue one is "better" than the other - I'd usually encourage code clarity in this situation. But it's important to realise that eq is very unforgiving while regular expressions are very flexible - allowing for case-insensitive searches, anchoring to just the beginning, etc. When you do hit some code in which comparison speed is critical then ultimately you'll want to benchmark.