Is there a (sane) way to get all custom fields for a post, which do not have a leading underscore?

by

  1. You can write your own function to do the matching at the SQL level
  2. Grab all of the keys and process them in PHP. You shouldn’t need regex. Simple string functions should do it.
  3. Don’t bother processing the results at all and instead just use the
    keys you need and ignore the rest– something like echo $meta['key'];
  4. Just ask for the particular key you want using get_post_meta

I doubt that #1 is going to be faster than #2, especially taking into account the built in caching. #3 should perform about as well as #2, given that same built in caching.

I don’t know what isn’t ‘sane’ about those options.