In 2014, it looks like character processing and regex processing take similar time for 1,000 iterations:
 
$ date
Thu Oct 16 00:28:38 PDT 2014

$ time ./sample.pl; time ./wrap_prop-regex_slow.pl 

real	0m0.171s
user	0m0.171s
sys	0m0.001s

real	0m0.210s
user	0m0.207s
sys	0m0.002s

