From: Adam Shelly <adam.shelly@...>
Date: 2005-12-15T14:31:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Question of reference and (sub)strings.

On 12/14/05, Steve [RubyTalk] <steve_rubytalk@shic.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Given that I only want to compute the offsets once, an obvious solution
> would be to construct an Array of String - each element representing a
> sub-string of the original... but this would double memory use.  What
> would be the best way to avoid duplicating the character sequences and
> causing run-time bloat?

You don't need to create the substrings until you need them:  Here's a
test which only allocates memory for the substrings as needed.  As far
as I can tell, the substrings are released back to the GC as soon as
you are done with them.

class IndexedString < String
  def initialize s, &indexer
    super s
    @offsets = yield self
    self
  end
  def substring n
    (0...(@offsets.size-1)) === n ?
      self[@offsets[n]...@offsets[n+1]] :
      nil
  end
end

def build_index s
  indexes = [0]
  while (n=s.index('.',indexes.last+1)) do indexes << n+1 end
  indexes << s.length+1
end

s = IndexedString.new( (("TESTINGTESTING!!"*1024)+".")*100) do |str|
      build_index(str)
end                         #= +1600K
s.substring 10;        #+16K
s.substring 95;        #+16K


> By corollary, if I had a large number of Strings, what would be the most
> memory efficient way to represent their concatenation?  If I had n mK
> stings, would I need another n*mK contiguous block of memory to
> represent their concatenation?

Not necessarily:  You can build a class which takes an array of
strings and returns
"superstrings" only as needed.  Here are my passing test cases, but
the class still needs a little work before I'll post it:

  def test_MegaString
     small_strings = %w( this is a collection of small strings)
     mega = MegaString.new(small_strings)
     assert_equal("t",mega[0])
     assert_equal("this",mega[0,4])
     assert_equal("hisisaco",mega[1,8])
     assert_equal("ollect",mega[8,6])
     assert_equal("a", mega[6...7])
     assert_equal("col", mega[7..10])
     assert_equal("lstrings", mega[23,-1])
     assert_equal("lstrings", mega[23,230])
     assert_equal("thisisacollectionofsmallstrings", mega.to_s)
  end



-Adam