fast_blank

String#blank? Ruby Extension

fast_blank is a simple C extension which provides a fast implementation of Active Support's String#blank? method.

How do you use it?

require 'fast_blank'

or add it to your Bundler Gemfile

gem 'fast_blank'

How fast is "Fast"?

About 1.2–20x faster than Active Support on my machine (your mileage my vary, depends on string length):

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Additionally, this gem allocates no strings during the test, making it less of a GC burden.

Compatibility note:

fast_blank supports MRI Ruby 1.9.3, 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2, as well as Rubinius 2.x. Earlier versions of MRI are untested.

fast_blank implements String#blank? as MRI would have implemented it, meaning it has 100% parity with String#strip.length == 0.

Active Support's version also considers Unicode spaces. For example, "\u2000\u2001\u2002\u2003\u2004\u2005\u2006\u2007\u2008\u2009\u200A\u202F\u205F\u3000".blank? is true in Active Support even though fast_blank would treat it as not blank. Therefore, fast_blank also provides blank_as? which is a 100%-compatible Active Support blank? replacement.

Credits

• Author: Sam Saffron ([email protected])
• https://github.com/SamSaffron/fast_blank
• License: MIT
• Gem template based on CodeMonkeySteve/fast_xor

Change log:

1.0.1:

• Minor, avoid warnings if redefining blank?

1.0.0:

• Adds Ruby 2.2 support (@tjschuck — #9)

0.0.2:

• Removed rake dependency (@tmm1 — #2)
• Unrolled internal loop to improve perf (@tmm1 — #2)