Fastest way to check if a string matches a regexp in ruby?

Question

What is the fastest way to check if a string matches a regular expression in Ruby?

My problem is that I have to \"egrep\" through a huge list of strings to find whic

Answer 1

What I am wondering is if there is any strange way to make this check even faster, maybe exploiting some strange method in Regexp or some weird construct.

Regexp engines vary in how they implement searches, but, in general, anchor your patterns for speed, and avoid greedy matches, especially when searching long strings.

The best thing to do, until you're familiar with how a particular engine works, is to do benchmarks and add/remove anchors, try limiting searches, use wildcards vs. explicit matches, etc.

The Fruity gem is very useful for quickly benchmarking things, because it's smart. Ruby's built-in Benchmark code is also useful, though you can write tests that fool you by not being careful.

I've used both in many answers here on Stack Overflow, so you can search through my answers and will see lots of little tricks and results to give you ideas of how to write faster code.

The biggest thing to remember is, it's bad to prematurely optimize your code before you know where the slowdowns occur.