String Replace

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FAST non-regular expression string search and replace function

Half of the time when doing string search and replace we do not require the regular expression functionality that comes with the string.gsub function. I have done a benchmark test with this new function and found it to be overall more than twice faster than gsub. The speed difference can be easily seen when doing search and replace on field values of thousands of records.

I have chosen to name the function 'replace' as Python, Ruby and most languages use 'replace' for the string search and replace function.

--Sam Lie

  static int str_replace(lua_State *L) {
    size_t l1, l2, l3;
    const char *src = luaL_checklstring(L, 1, &l1);
    const char *p = luaL_checklstring(L, 2, &l2);
    const char *p2 = luaL_checklstring(L, 3, &l3);
    const char *s2;
    int n = 0;
    int init = 0;

    luaL_Buffer b;
    luaL_buffinit(L, &b);

   while (1) {
     s2 = lmemfind(src+init, l1-init, p, l2);
     if (s2) {
		 luaL_addlstring(&b, src+init, s2-(src+init));
		 luaL_addlstring(&b, p2, l3);
		 init = init + (s2-(src+init)) + l2;
		 n++;
     } else {
	    luaL_addlstring(&b, src+init, l1-init);
	    break;
	 }
   }


   luaL_pushresult(&b);
   lua_pushnumber(L, (lua_Number)n);  /* number of substitutions */
   return 2;
 }


--*note  add new the 'replace' function to strlib 

static const luaL_reg strlib[] = {
   {"len", str_len},
   {"sub", str_sub},
   {"lower", str_lower},
   {"upper", str_upper},
   {"char", str_char},
   {"getchar", str_getchar},
   {"rep", str_rep},
   {"byte", str_byte},
   {"format", str_format},
   {"dump", str_dump},
   {"find", str_find},
   {"gfind", gfind},
   {"gsub", str_gsub},
   {"replace", str_replace},
   {NULL, NULL}
 };