Optimising ruby regexp -- lots of match groups
- by Farcaller
I'm working on a ruby baser lexer. To improve performance, I joined up all tokens' regexps into one big regexp with match group names. The resulting regexp looks like:
/\A(?<__anonymous_-1038694222803470993>(?-mix:\n+))|\A(?<__anonymous_-1394418499721420065>(?-mix:\/\/[\A\n]*))|\A(?<__anonymous_3077187815313752157>(?-mix:include\s+"[\A"]+"))|\A(?<LET>(?-mix:let\s))|\A(?<IN>(?-mix:in\s))|\A(?<CLASS>(?-mix:class\s))|\A(?<DEF>(?-mix:def\s))|\A(?<DEFM>(?-mix:defm\s))|\A(?<MULTICLASS>(?-mix:multiclass\s))|\A(?<FUNCNAME>(?-mix:![a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*))|\A(?<ID>(?-mix:[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*))|\A(?<STRING>(?-mix:"[\A"]*"))|\A(?<NUMBER>(?-mix:[0-9]+))/
I'm matching it to my string producing a MatchData where exactly one token is parsed:
bigregex =~ "\n ... garbage"
puts $~.inspect
Which outputs
#<MatchData
"\n"
__anonymous_-1038694222803470993:"\n"
__anonymous_-1394418499721420065:nil
__anonymous_3077187815313752157:nil
LET:nil
IN:nil
CLASS:nil
DEF:nil
DEFM:nil
MULTICLASS:nil
FUNCNAME:nil
ID:nil
STRING:nil
NUMBER:nil>
So, the regex actually matched the "\n" part. Now, I need to figure the match group where it belongs (it's clearly visible from #inspect output that it's _anonymous-1038694222803470993, but I need to get it programmatically).
I could not find any option other than iterating over #names:
m.names.each do |n|
if m[n]
type = n.to_sym
resolved_type = (n.start_with?('__anonymous_') ? nil : type)
val = m[n]
break
end
end
which verifies that the match group did have a match.
The problem here is that it's slow (I spend about 10% of time in the loop; also 8% grabbing the @input[@pos..-1] to make sure that \A works as expected to match start of string (I do not discard input, just shift the @pos in it).
You can check the full code at GH repo.
Any ideas on how to make it at least a bit faster? Is there any option to figure the "successful" match group easier?
