String#nstrip ?

Hi all,

When using the Win32API package, I often have to resort to this idiom to get a 
string out of a buffer:

string.split(0.chr).first

The problem is that it's kinda slow.  No, I can't use String#rstrip or 
String#gsub because often there's other junk at the end of the string that 
would prevent those methods from working.

What about adding a String#nstrip (null strip) method that would return a 
string up to the first NULL character?  Here's a simple implementation:

/* Returns the string up to and excluding the first NULL character */
static VALUE rb_str_nstrip(str){
    return rb_str_new2(RSTRING(str)->ptr);
}

This does emit a "cast to pointer from integer of different size" warning 
however, so perhaps there's a more appropriate approach.  Any, you get the 
general idea.

It's also about six times faster according to my benchmarks:

# nullbench.rb
require 'benchmark'

MAX = 100000
STRING = "hello\0\0\0\0"

Benchmark.bm do |x|
require 'benchmark'

MAX = 100000
STRING = "hello\0\0\0\0"

Benchmark.bm do |x|
    x.report("String#split"){
       MAX.times{ STRING.split("\0").first }
    }

    # Custom method
    x.report("String#nstrip"){
       MAX.times{ STRING.nstrip }
    }
end

djberge@~/programming/ruby-544>/opt/test/bin/ruby nullbench.rb
       user     system      total        real
String#split  3.470000   0.020000   3.490000 (  3.561128)
String#nstrip  0.550000   0.010000   0.560000 (  0.587311)

Useful? Or too specialized?

Thanks,

Dan


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