Faster way to do search and replace on a comma del

Question

I have a CSV file in which I want to do a search and replace on each line to form SQL statements. I have come up with this perl script ...

#!/bin/bash
perl -pi -e "s/(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*)/REPLACE INTO student (ID, SIS_ID, STUDENT_NUM, USER_ID, OTHER_USER_ID) VALUES (REPLACE(uuid(), '-', ''), '\$24', '\$26', '\$2', '\$27');/g" $1 

However, on a one line file, this takes about 15 seconds to run. As you can imagine on a file of thousnads of lines, this takes hours.

Is there another way I can write the above that would speed up the search and replace? I'm not married to Perl. I'm using Mac 10.9.5, bash shell.

Answer 1

Try replacing each (.*) with this: ([^,]+)

I am sure it will reduce the execution time.

Answer 2

Rather than search and replace, I'd probably parse the CSV file and construct the SQL statements line by line. It doesn't look like you're doing anything that needs the text-matching capabilities of a regular expression.

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Edit: see my answer on your other, very similar, potentially duplicate post for the "correct" way to do this.