Eli Barzilay wrote at 03/31/2011 07:46 PM:
Two minutes ago, Charles Hixson wrote:
Hi, I'm trying to determine whether the last non-whitespace character of a
string is a colon,
(define (last-non-ws str)
(cond [(regexp-match #px"(\\S)\\s*$" " \t") => cadr]
[else #f]))
then see the docs about regexps and this use of `cond'.
Or, more specific:
(define (last-non-whitespace-character-of-string-is-colon? str)
(regexp-match? #px":\\s*$" str))
The best I've come up with is to explode the string into a list of characters,
and handle it that way, but that's clearly quite wasteful of both processing
and RAM.
Your intuition about exploding the string seems pretty good to me,
mainly because I like to think of allocations as expensive.
Another way to do this is in Racket (or in old Scheme, for that matter)
is to do a "string-length" and then one or more "string-ref", starting
at the end or the beginning of the string. Or, if you had slow regexps
but faster (constant-time?) "string-length" and "string-ref", I suppose
it might be beneficial to first check the last character of the string,
and if it's colon, return true; if it's whitespace, do the regexp; if
it's neither colon nor whitespace, return false.
If you were micro-optimizing, you could try a few approaches and compare
the performance of each in representative contexts. In practice, I'd
bet that just using a regexp is fine.
--
http://www.neilvandyke.org/
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