With pre-compiled regex the Python version comes down to 1.483s on my machine which is still considerably slower than Perl. I wrote versions of these using substring `index` instead of a regex and Perl was still the clear winner:
time ./index.pl 0.258s
time ./index.py 0.609s
If you factor-in that Python startup time is 0.279s slower than Perl the processing differential comes down to 0.072s.
Well, the two ifs you hedge to qualify Python's parity are pretty damning in themselves, no? Let's stop beating about the bush - if you want to perform a common text-processing job like parsing a log file Perl is hands down faster than Python.
