Tips on making regex more performant?

[Gary Willoughby]

> I'm working with some string-heavy applications so I was 
> curious about this myself. I'm new to D, but I did some heavy 
> data analysis on chat files a while back.
>
> Not knowing anything about your data or what other queries you 
> might want to do on it, matching the first part of the string 
> with std.algorithm.startsWith() and splitting the line on a 
> delimiter outperforms regex matching on my admittedly arbitrary 
> test code.

This is the approach i used and it's very very fast. Using 
std.algorithm.startsWith() and simple delimiter based string 
slicing i've solved it. It's so fast there is hardly any slow 
down.

As a side note, i also use regex matching for the same data in 
debug blocks to assert the slicing method matches what i would of 
got from the regex, which is nice.