How Can Boost Spirit Accelerate Space-Separated Float Parsing in C ?

Accelerating Space-Separated Float Parsing in C

In scenarios involving the processing of massive files containing lines of space-separated floats, the bottleneck often lies not in file access but in the parsing process.

Existing Techniques:

The question introduces a technique involving consecutive extraction using stream operators (>>), which can be efficient but limited in speed. Additionally, strtok, a string-splitting function, is mentioned, but it requires further conversions to floats.

Boost Spirit: The Ultimate Solution

Boost Spirit, particularly its grammar-based parser, proves to be the superior choice for this task. It handles data validation, error reporting, and whitespace flexibility with remarkable efficiency.

Performance Comparison:

Extensive benchmarking conducted by the questioner revealed that Boost Spirit outperforms all other alternatives:

[Image of performance comparison charts]

Spirit X3: A New Contender

For those utilizing C 14, the experimental Spirit X3 is even faster, as demonstrated in the updated benchmarks.

Code Implementation:

The code snippet below showcases a Boost Spirit implementation for parsing the given line format:

bool ok = phrase_parse(f, l, (double_ > double_ > double_) % eol, blank, data);

Key Advantages of Boost Spirit:

• Error handling and reporting
• Support for /-Inf, NaN, and varying whitespace
• Robust detection of end-of-input
• Syntactically concise and readable code

The above is the detailed content of How Can Boost Spirit Accelerate Space-Separated Float Parsing in C ?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!