Re: "A" and "an" articles in front of words

On Nov 6, 2011, at 12:59 , steve ross wrote:

> Sorry to be late to the party on this one, but a regex seems a bit of =
a big hammer. How about:
>=20
> def article_for(noun)
>  article =3D %w(a e i o u).include?(noun[0..0]) ? 'an' : 'a'
>  "#{article} #{noun}"
> end
>=20
> irb(main):022:0> article_for 'dog'
> =3D> "a dog"
> irb(main):023:0> article_for 'animal'
> =3D> "an animal"

A regex is not that big of a hammer, and doing this is one method =
dispatch over two has direct performance benefits (if that matters):

require 'benchmark'

# # of iterations =3D 1000000
#                           user     system      total        real
# null_time             0.120000   0.000000   0.120000 (  0.118742)
# article_for           8.440000   0.000000   8.440000 (  8.444280)
# articlize             6.100000   0.010000   6.110000 (  6.107140)
# articlize2            5.940000   0.000000   5.940000 (  5.942385)

def article_for(noun)
 article =3D %w(a e i o u).include?(noun[0..0]) ? 'an' : 'a'
 "#{article} #{noun}"
end

def articlize noun
  article =3D /^[aeiou]/ =3D~ noun ? 'an' : 'a'
  "#{article} #{noun}"
end

# just to see if this makes much of a difference
def articlize2 noun
  "#{/^[aeiou]/ =3D~ noun ? 'an' : 'a'} #{noun}"
end

max =3D (ARGV.shift || 1_000_000).to_i

puts "# of iterations =3D #{max}"
Benchmark::bm(20) do |x|
  x.report("null_time") do
    for i in 0..max do
      # do nothing
    end
  end

  x.report("article_for") do
    for i in 0..max do
      article_for 'dog'
      article_for 'animal'
    end
  end

  x.report("articlize") do
    for i in 0..max do
      articlize 'dog'
      articlize 'animal'
    end
  end

  x.report("articlize2") do
    for i in 0..max do
      articlize2 'dog'
      articlize2 'animal'
    end
  end
end