title: Speed of many regular expressions in python
body: <p>I'm writing a python program that deals with a fair amount of strings/files. My problem is that I'm going to be presented with a fairly short piece of text, and I'm going to need to search it for instances of a fairly broad range of words/phrases.</p>
  
  <p>I'm thinking I'll need to compile regular expressions as a way of matching these words/phrases in the text. My concern, however, is that this will take a lot of time.</p>
  
  <p>My question is how fast is the process of repeatedly compiling regular expressions, and then searching through a small body of text to find matches? Would I be better off using some string method?</p>
  
  <p>Edit: So, I guess an example of my question would be: How expensive would it be to compile and search with one regular expression versus say, iterating 'if "word" in string' say, 5 times? </p>