From: William James <w_a_x_man@...>
Date: 2005-02-09T18:15:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Benchmark Mono - Ruby

Glenn Parker wrote:
> ....  In general,
> Perl and Python do not do nearly so poorly in such comparisons.

I was surprised to discover that Ruby was slower at parsing
a certain csv file than Brian Kernighan's version of Awk was.
The file contains 26907 copies of
3.1415926535,1492,"Hello, worldly ones!",foo bar,"Just ""peachy"" keen"

A different file that had lines composed of many fields of 1 character
was parsed at the same speed by both languages.

* # For the 26907 records in standard-data-big,
* # takes about 4.3 seconds.  Faster than Ruby,
* # which takes about 6.7 seconds (5.9 in fast mode).
*
* {
* #   print
*   parse_csv( $0, rec )
* #   printf "["
* #   sep = ""
* #   for (i=1;i in rec; i++)
* #   { printf "%s<%s>", sep, rec[i]
* #     sep = ", "
* #   }
* #   print "]"
* }
* END { print NR }
*
* function parse_csv( str, array,    field,i )
* { split( "", array )
*   str = str ","
*   while ( match(str,
*     /[ \t]*("[^"]*(""[^"]*)*"|[^,]*)[ \t]*,/) )
*   { field = substr( str, 1, RLENGTH )
*     gsub( /^[ \t]*"?|"?[ \t]*,$/, "", field )
*     gsub( /""/, "\"", field )
*     array[++i] = field
*     str = substr( str, RLENGTH + 1 )
*   }
* }