In general, AFAIK, regex's, are usually the cause of many performance problems. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/01/regex-performance.html

In any case, you are correct that for these sized strings it probably wont matter much and make it nicer. But then i wouldnt have a general purpose function that i can reuse... I think i'll keep as is for now. But it is a good suggestion.