To avoid questions of byte boundary alignment you could perhaps convert the vector to a character string and use regex matching with @- to find your offset. This seems to work quite quickly unless you look for a contiguous block of a length that doesn't actually exist. On my fairly old laptop that will take a little while before it decides it can't find the block.

use strict;
use warnings;

use 5.014;
use List::Util  qw{ max };
use Time::HiRes qw{ gettimeofday tv_interval };

my $t0 = [ gettimeofday() ];
srand 1234567;

my $vec = q{};
vec( $vec, 536_870_911, 1 ) = 0;
vec( $vec, int rand 536_870_911, 1 ) = 1 for 1 .. 1e7;

my $t1 = [ gettimeofday() ];
say qq{Creating vector - @{ [ tv_interval( $t0, $t1 ) ] }};

my $bitStr = unpack q{b*}, $vec;

my $t2 = [ gettimeofday() ];
say qq{Unpacking bitstring - @{ [ tv_interval( $t1, $t2 ) ] }};

say
   qq{Longest contiguous block of zeros is },
   max map length, $bitStr =~ m{(0+)}g,
   q{ bits long};

my $t3 = [ gettimeofday() ];
say qq{Finding longest block - @{ [ tv_interval( $t2, $t3 ) ] }};

for my $numZeros ( 25, 78, 307, 599, 943 )
{
    my $ts = [ gettimeofday() ];
    say qq{At least $numZeros contiguous 0s },
       $bitStr =~ m{(0{$numZeros,})}
       ? qq{found at offset $-[ 0 ], length @{ [ length $1 ] }}
       : q{could not be found};
    say qq{     Search took - @{ [ tv_interval( $ts, [ gettimeofday() 
+] ) ] }};
}

[download]

The output.

Creating vector - 6.612482
Unpacking bitstring - 2.121185
Longest contiguous block of zeros is 843
Finding longest block - 9.848668
At least 25 contiguous 0s found at offset 0, length 37
     Search took - 1.685613
At least 78 contiguous 0s found at offset 134, length 85
     Search took - 0.725265
At least 307 contiguous 0s found at offset 31289, length 343
     Search took - 0.702597
At least 599 contiguous 0s found at offset 5476471, length 625
     Search took - 0.82269
At least 943 contiguous 0s could not be found
     Search took - 12.095307

[download]

I don't know whether this method will be fast enough for your purposes but I think it is likely to be simpler that juggling byte boundaries. I hope this will be of use.

Cheers,

JohnGG

In reply to Re: Locating a specified number of contiguous 0 bits within a large bitstring efficiently. by johngg
in thread Locating a specified number of contiguous 0 bits within a large bitstring efficiently. by BrowserUk

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