From: Daniel Sheppard <daniels@...>
Date: 2007-11-30T11:42:37+09:00
Subject: Re: FEATURE SUGGESTION: Accept default value for to_f and to_i

 
> 6) would avoid expensive regular expressions

First, you'd have to conjure up some expensive regular expressions,
you'll find that regular expressions are much more efficient that you
might think.

Pointless micro-benchmark time. String input of 'ab', 1 million
iterations.

                                                        user     system
total        real
string.to_i                                         0.625000   0.000000
0.625000 (  0.657000)
Integer(string) rescue 57                          32.422000   0.782000
33.204000 ( 34.844000)
/^-?\d+$/===string ? string.to_i : 57               1.125000   0.000000
1.125000 (  1.218000)
string.to_f                                         0.718000   0.000000
0.718000 (  0.843000)
Float(string) rescue 57                            32.281000   0.765000
33.046000 ( 34.750000)
/^-?\d+(?=\.\d+)?$/===string ? string.to_f : 57     0.672000   0.000000
0.672000 (  0.734000)


The only advantage to your proposal is to optimise an exceptional case.
If it's not an exceptional case, regex validation gives you almost as
much speed as you'd get with raw C.

Once you've written an application with this functionality, benchmarked
it, and found that that validation of string data as numeric is your
problem, you can go off and write a C extension to do what you want.
Raising this discussion before that point is just wasting your time.

Dan.