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When trying to validate that a string is made up of alphabetic characters only, two possible regex solutions come to my mind.
The first one checks that every character in the string is alphanumeric:
/^[a-z]+$/
The second one tries to find a character somewhere in the string that is not alphanumeric:
/[^a-z]/
(Yes, I could use character classes here.)
Is there any significant performance difference for long strings?
(If anything, I’d guess the second variant is faster.)
Just by looking at it, I’d say the second method is faster.
However, I made a quick non-scientific test, and the results seem to be inconclusive:
Regex Match vs. Negation.
P.S. I removed the group capture from the first method. It’s superfluous, and would only slow it down.