Re: How to trim a String trailing spaces, but not leading spaces?

From:
"John B. Matthews" <nospam@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Fri, 12 Sep 2008 01:28:14 -0400
Message-ID:
<nospam-AF2FCD.01281412092008@news.motzarella.org>
In article <gacdhi$u9$1@registered.motzarella.org>,
 Mark Space <markspace@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

John B. Matthews wrote:

As did I. Sadly, they tend to be slow. Curious, I compared the regex to
Lew's loop proposal. The latter is an order of magnitude faster. The two


Micro benchmarks can be a dangerous thing. In your code you it's pretty
likely that the regex search (which takes a string parameter) has to be
compiled each time it runs. I'd be curious what the run time is if the
pattern is precompiled once then re-used. You also only search one very
short string, which may skew the results also.


Excellent point. Not surprisingly, pre-compiling the regex helps, but
the benefit diminishes with increasing string length. The Loop time
approaches the others to within a factor of two, but only for
unreasonably long padding.

<sscce>
import java.lang.StringBuilder;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class RightTrim {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    for (int i = 1; i < 5; i++) {
      String s = testString((int) Math.pow(10, i));
      (new RegEx()).test(s);
      (new Compiled()).test(s);
      (new Loop()).test(s);
      System.out.println();
    }
  }

  private static String testString(int padding) {
    String controls = "\t\n\u000B\f\r";
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder("Test");
    for (int i = 0; i < padding; i++) sb.append(" ");
    sb.append(controls);
    return sb.toString();
  }
}

abstract class Test {
  public static final int COUNT = 10000;
  public void test(String in) {
    long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    for (int i = 0; i < COUNT; i++) rTrim(in);
    System.out.println(name()
      + (System.currentTimeMillis() - start));
  }
  public abstract String rTrim(String in);
  public abstract String name();
}

/** @author JBM */
class RegEx extends Test {
  public String rTrim( String in ) {
    return in.replaceAll("\\s+$", "");
  }
  public String name() { return "RegExpr: "; }
}

/** @author JBM, MS */
class Compiled extends Test {
  private static final Pattern right = Pattern.compile("\\s+$");
  public String rTrim( String in ) {
    return right.matcher(in).replaceAll("");
  }
  public String name() { return "Compiled: "; }
}

/** @author Lew */
class Loop extends Test {
  public String rTrim( String in ) {
    int len = in.length();
    while ( len > 0 ) {
      if ( ! Character.isWhitespace( in.charAt( --len ))) {
        return in.substring( 0, len + 1 );
      }
    }
    return "";
  }
  public String name() { return "Loop: "; }
}
</sscce>

However, good job doing the benchmarking. It's important to test, and
even a skewed test might be better than none at all.


--
John B. Matthews
trashgod at gmail dot com
home dot woh dot rr dot com slash jbmatthews

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