Re^3: Efficient walk/iterate along a string

Monks

I tried the split/tr/map approach suggested by Grandfather and got ~ 60% reduction in time, great ! (and yes you got my app requirement exactly right)

I think should withdraw my words that there's nothing to be gained from the special functions when you're just marching down strings and doing a seemingly arbitrary logic function (and also my words about inadequate context). Splitting at simple marker points and counting a simple set of chars within the splits, combined with Perl's superb list handling, is not arbitrary spaghetti logic. Lesson learned.

One query: the ?<= construct was new to me, I've played with it and read up on it (perlre/Extended Patterns/Look-Around Assertions) and I'm 80% there but if anyone could explain exactly how this RE is ensuring I get exactly what I need I'd be grateful.

Will continue to check some other posts, thanks all

GJE

Comment on Re^3: Efficient walk/iterate along a string

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Re^4: Efficient walk/iterate along a string by GrandFather (Saint) on Nov 25, 2010 at 00:42 UTC
I'm disappointed at only a 60% improvement! Maybe the segments are shorter than I would have guessed. This technique would give the best improvement for long strings containing few segments. I used a look behind in the split regular expression to retain the matched character at the end of the previous segment. Use a `[KR]` match to drop the 'K' or 'R', or use a look ahead match `(?=[KR])` to retain the matched character at the start of the segment. Look behind and look ahead are anchors, they don't "consume" the matched characters, they just mark a position where some match condition is true. In this case we are testing for "was the last character R or K?". True laziness is hard work	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re^4: Efficient walk/iterate along a string
by GrandFather (Saint) on Nov 25, 2010 at 00:42 UTC

I'm disappointed at only a 60% improvement! Maybe the segments are shorter than I would have guessed. This technique would give the best improvement for long strings containing few segments.

I used a look behind in the split regular expression to retain the matched character at the end of the previous segment. Use a [KR] match to drop the 'K' or 'R', or use a look ahead match (?=[KR]) to retain the matched character at the start of the segment.

Look behind and look ahead are anchors, they don't "consume" the matched characters, they just mark a position where some match condition is true. In this case we are testing for "was the last character R or K?".

True laziness is hard work

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]