RegEx vs Character Loop

As is often the case with database management, we invariably have to clean up the data at some point. This demo was inspired by a thread discussion at UtterAccess where the original poster was looking for a way to remove unwanted characters from table records. (Here's the link to the UA thread, for additional information on the requirement.)

So, the requirement is easy enough, and as we all know in Access, there's always more than one way to reach a solution for any particular problem. That was also the case in this situation.

The two approaches I am comparing in this demo for removing unwanted characters from a string field in a table are (a) using regular expressions and (b) looping through the characters of the string. Both approaches will perform the job as required, but I was just curious if one particular approach would be faster than the other.

(click on the above image to download the demo file)

There may be other ways to test this theory other than the way I did it in this demo. For example, we could probably test the amount of time it would take to create a new table based on the result of cleaning up the data. As it stands right now, I just simply open and close a query containing a function call to each approach.

I encourage you to download the test file (it's only 526 KB) and try it out for yourself. Different configurations should give us different results. Please share your results if you do decide to give it a try and give us your conclusions as well.

I hope someone could find this little experiment somewhat useful in your projects or learning experience.

Thank you for reading...

UPDATE:
I wasn't sure if simply opening and closing the queries calling each function is enough to test for speed, so I added a couple more processes within each approach. You can download v1.1 using this link, if you want to see if it makes any difference in your outcomes. Cheers!