What is the fastest way to Parse a line in Delphi?

Question

I have a huge file that I must parse line by line. Speed is of the essence.

Example of a line:

Token-1   Here-is-the-Next-Token      Last-Token-on-Line
      ^                        ^
   Current                 Position
   Position              after GetToken

GetToken is called, returning "Here-is-the-Next-Token" and sets the CurrentPosition to the position of the last character of the token so that it is ready for the next call to GetToken. Tokens are separated by one or more spaces.

Assume the file is already in a StringList in memory. It fits in memory easily, say 200 MB.

I am worried only about the execution time for the parsing. What code will produce the absolute fastest execution in Delphi (Pascal)?

Answer 1

• Use PChar incrementing for speed of processing
• If some tokens are not needed, only copy token data on demand
• Copy PChar to local variable when actually scanning through characters
• Keep source data in a single buffer unless you must handle line by line, and even then, consider handling line processing as a separate token in the lexer recognizer
• Consider processing a byte array buffer that has come straight from the file, if you definitely know the encoding; if using Delphi 2009, use PAnsiChar instead of PChar, unless of course you know the encoding is UTF16-LE.
• If you know that the only whitespace is going to be #32 (ASCII space), or a similarly limited set of characters, there may be some clever bit manipulation hacks that can let you process 4 bytes at a time using Integer scanning. I wouldn't expect big wins here though, and the code will be as clear as mud.

Here's a sample lexer that should be pretty efficient, but it assumes that all source data is in a single string. Reworking it to handle buffers is moderately tricky due to very long tokens.

type
  TLexer = class
  private
    FData: string;
    FTokenStart: PChar;
    FCurrPos: PChar;
    function GetCurrentToken: string;
  public
    constructor Create(const AData: string);
    function GetNextToken: Boolean;
    property CurrentToken: string read GetCurrentToken;
  end;

{ TLexer }

constructor TLexer.Create(const AData: string);
begin
  FData := AData;
  FCurrPos := PChar(FData);
end;

function TLexer.GetCurrentToken: string;
begin
  SetString(Result, FTokenStart, FCurrPos - FTokenStart);
end;

function TLexer.GetNextToken: Boolean;
var
  cp: PChar;
begin
  cp := FCurrPos; // copy to local to permit register allocation

  // skip whitespace; this test could be converted to an unsigned int
  // subtraction and compare for only a single branch
  while (cp^ > #0) and (cp^ <= #32) do
    Inc(cp);

  // using null terminater for end of file
  Result := cp^ <> #0;

  if Result then
  begin
    FTokenStart := cp;
    Inc(cp);
    while cp^ > #32 do
      Inc(cp);
  end;

  FCurrPos := cp;
end;