Previous PEPs to add pattern matching — PEP 275 and PEP 3103, proposed in 2001 and 2006 respectively — were turned down due to lack of popular support.PEP 3103 was drafted by Python creator ...

Compiled regular expressions still performed comparatively well in Python, though. This method processed the 100,000 lines in 165 ms, about two times faster than string primitives in Python.