<banzaaaaiiiiii> On Mon, Jul 01, 2002 at 10:54:26AM +0100, Mark Fowler wrote: > So...I've got this tight loop where I need to whip a single character out > of a ten char long string.
The Perl Character Cleaving Conundrum > Now this is Perl, so there's more than one way > to do it, unpack and substr. Which is faster? Place bets now! [tick...tick...tick] Betting Ends! > mark@pate:~/bench$ time perl unpack >/dev/null If you say "unpack", you a loser! > mark@pate:~/bench$ time perl substr >/dev/null If you say "substr", you the winner! </banzaaaaiiiiii> > So substr is much faster. Did this surprise anyone? No, not really. unpack is generic, substr is specific (i.e. substr grabs characters from strings whereas unpack grabs variable-length entities from a collection of bits and bytes). More specialised nearly always means "faster and smaller". A
