> I'm working with some string-heavy applications so I was curious about this myself. I'm new to D, but I did some heavy data analysis on chat files a while back.
>
> Not knowing anything about your data or what other queries you might want to do on it, matching the first part of the string with std.algorithm.startsWith() and splitting the line on a delimiter outperforms regex matching on my admittedly arbitrary test code.

This is the approach i used and it's very very fast. Using std.algorithm.startsWith() and simple delimiter based string slicing i've solved it. It's so fast there is hardly any slow down.

As a side note, i also use regex matching for the same data in debug blocks to assert the slicing method matches what i would of got from the regex, which is nice.