Fast NFA engine anyone?

Hi there!
      I'm writing a program to match a list of regexp against a file to
check which one matches and, in case, extract substring from the
matching text for further processing. All regexp are anchored (i.e. I
only need to find matches at the beginning of the line).


      The first implementation I wrote uses a NFA representation for the
regexps. Now I'm looking for something faster.


      I have the impression that going with a DFA representation is not a
good idea. I feel that the time I will have to spend extracting the
substring from the matching text will wipe out any benefit I will get (I
might be wrong, of course).


      Being all the regexps anchored, there should be a easier way!


      Consider that I would even sacrifice some of the expressiveness of
regexp. I already dropped the operator | without any impact on the final
application.


      I hope you can help me to answer the following questions.


      Is there an optimized implementation of a NFA engine (or a paper
describing how to do it)?


      Is there any work done on comparing NFA and DFA when regexp are
anchored (if it makes a difference as I suspect)?


      There could be a better approach (e.g. SNOBOL-like pattern matching
operators)?


      Any help would be gratefully appreciated!


      Remo D.
[I think you're wrong about DFAs. If your patterns are really all anchored,
the match is the string from the beginning of the line to the point where
the match succeeded. -John]

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