From: Adam Prescott <adam@...>
Date: 2011-08-10T21:02:52+09:00
Subject: Re: *WHY* does this not work?

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On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 8:27 PM, John W Higgins <wishdev@gmail.com> wrote:

> str.length.times do |i|
>  str[i] = 'x'
> end
>

As an alternative to this (although I'd just use #gsub!), if the character
doesn't change then you might as well do:

str.replace("x" * str.length)

To satisfy my curiosity, a crude benchmark:

$ cat str_replace_benchmark.rb
require "benchmark"
puts Benchmark.realtime { str = "hello, world!"; 10_000.times {
str.replace("x" * str.length) } }
puts Benchmark.realtime { str = "hello, world!"; 10_000.times {
str.gsub!(/./, "x") } }

$ ruby str_replace_benchmark.rb
0.007066011428833008
0.10264110565185547

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