Faster alternatives to replace method in a Java String?

Question

The fact that the replace method returns a string object rather than replacing the contents of a given string is a little obtuse (but understandable when you know that strin

Answer 1

The previous posts are right, StringBuilder/StringBuffer are a solution.

But, you also have to question if it is a good idea to do the replace on big Strings in memory.

I often have String manipulations that are implemented as a stream, so instead of replacing it in the string and then sending it to an OutputStream, I do the replace at the moment that I send the String to the outputstream. That works much faster than any replace.

This works much faster if you want this replace to implement a template mechanism. Streaming is always faster since you consume less memory and if the clients is slow, you only need to generate at a slow pace - so it scales much better.

Answer 2

Adding to the @paxdiablo answer, here's a sample implementation of a replaceAll using StringBuffers that is a ~3.7 times faster than String.replaceAll():

Code:

public static String replaceAll(final String str, final String searchChars, String replaceChars)
{
  if ("".equals(str) || "".equals(searchChars) || searchChars.equals(replaceChars))
  {
    return str;
  }
  if (replaceChars == null)
  {
    replaceChars = "";
  }
  final int strLength = str.length();
  final int searchCharsLength = searchChars.length();
  StringBuilder buf = new StringBuilder(str);
  boolean modified = false;
  for (int i = 0; i < strLength; i++)
  {
    int start = buf.indexOf(searchChars, i);

    if (start == -1)
    {
      if (i == 0)
      {
        return str;
      }
      return buf.toString();
    }
    buf = buf.replace(start, start + searchCharsLength, replaceChars);
    modified = true;

  }
  if (!modified)
  {
    return str;
  }
  else
  {
    return buf.toString();
  }
}

Test Case -- the output is the following (Delta1 = 1917009502; Delta2 =7241000026):

@Test
public void testReplaceAll() 
{
  String origStr = "1234567890-1234567890-";

  String replacement1 =  StringReplacer.replaceAll(origStr, "0", "a");
  String expectedRep1 = "123456789a-123456789a-";

  String replacement2 =  StringReplacer.replaceAll(origStr, "0", "ab");
  String expectedRep2 = "123456789ab-123456789ab-";

  String replacement3 =  StringReplacer.replaceAll(origStr, "0", "");
  String expectedRep3 = "123456789-123456789-";


  String replacement4 =  StringReplacer.replaceAll(origStr, "012", "a");
  String expectedRep4 = "1234567890-1234567890-";

  String replacement5 =  StringReplacer.replaceAll(origStr, "123", "ab");
  String expectedRep5 = "ab4567890-ab4567890-";

  String replacement6 =  StringReplacer.replaceAll(origStr, "123", "abc");
  String expectedRep6 = "abc4567890-abc4567890-";

  String replacement7 =  StringReplacer.replaceAll(origStr, "123", "abcdd");
  String expectedRep7 = "abcdd4567890-abcdd4567890-";

  String replacement8 =  StringReplacer.replaceAll(origStr, "123", "");
  String expectedRep8 = "4567890-4567890-";

  String replacement9 =  StringReplacer.replaceAll(origStr, "123", "");
  String expectedRep9 = "4567890-4567890-";

  assertEquals(replacement1, expectedRep1);
  assertEquals(replacement2, expectedRep2);
  assertEquals(replacement3, expectedRep3);
  assertEquals(replacement4, expectedRep4);
  assertEquals(replacement5, expectedRep5);
  assertEquals(replacement6, expectedRep6);
  assertEquals(replacement7, expectedRep7);
  assertEquals(replacement8, expectedRep8);
  assertEquals(replacement9, expectedRep9);

  long start1 = System.nanoTime();
  for (long i = 0; i < 10000000L; i++)
  {
    String rep =  StringReplacer.replaceAll(origStr, "123", "abcdd");
  }
  long delta1 = System.nanoTime() -start1;

  long start2= System.nanoTime();

  for (long i = 0; i < 10000000L; i++)
  {
    String rep =  origStr.replaceAll( "123", "abcdd");
  }

  long delta2 = System.nanoTime() -start1;

  assertTrue(delta1 < delta2);

  System.out.printf("Delta1 = %d; Delta2 =%d", delta1, delta2);


}

Answer 3

When you're replacing single characters, consider iterating over your character array but replace characters by using a (pre-created) HashMap<Character, Character>().

I use this strategy to convert an integer exponent string by unicode superscript characters.

It's about twice as fast compared to String.replace(char, char). Note that the time associated to creating the hash map isn't included in this comparison.

Answer 4

All string manipulation in general are very slow. Consider to use StringBuffer, it's not exactly like the String class, but have a lot in common and it's mutable as well.