by J. Ambrose Little
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As you can see in Figure 1, the differences between the six methods are not that dramatic when there is a valid input. I did find that the Regular Expression tended to slow down with larger inputs, but overall, given that these numbers were produced by 100,000 tries, the time required for each and the difference between each is very insignificant. The incremental char search has the clear edge of about one tenth of a second.
In Figure 2, we see the trend take a dramatic turn, with both methods using a catch block increasing over tenfold to around nine seconds, which highlights the extra effort involved in catching exceptions. The other methods are almost identical to their counterparts in the previous test, excepting the Regular Expression, which added a good two tenths of a second. And again, the incremental char search wins out in raw performance by about a tenth of a second. You may be thinking that if there were more valid numbers prior to the invalid chars that it would lose the advantage (since it would short circuit later), but I tested into the trillions with about the same performance.
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Article Feedback
User Comments
Title:
Straight to the point
Name:
Fabio C. Rispoli
Date:
8/1/2006 4:16:33 PM
Comment:
Congratulations for the article. Simple and straight to the point.
Thanks.
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Title:
Mr.
Name:
mike
Date:
4/5/2006 10:30:42 AM
Comment:
double.TryParse is also slower than Incremental Chars.
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Title:
Gopal
Name:
Ambrose
Date:
3/22/2006 1:19:05 PM
Comment:
Gopal,
It's been a long time that I looked at this, but I seem to recall that the VB code didn't use double.TryParse. Maybe it was updated? Are you looking at v2 because this was written before v2 was in alpha...
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Title:
Another note
Name:
gopal
Date:
3/22/2006 1:13:08 PM
Comment:
Incremental char returns true for empty strings.
Also, looking at the disassembly code, Visualbasic Isnumeric uses Double.TryParse.
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Title:
just a note
Name:
E
Date:
2/16/2006 3:37:19 PM
Comment:
I was just noticing that the Incremental Char method returns false for negative numbers. . .
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Title:
IsNumeric?
Name:
Peter Hartlén
Date:
11/17/2005 3:31:17 AM
Comment:
First of all, I did the test with converting a string to integer. Although the code needed for this was a bit more than I at first expected, the performance overhead (compared to simple TryParse) was not that much. The code I used:
public bool TryParseToInt ( string expression, out int iIntVal )
{
double dVal;
bool bRes;
bRes = double.TryParse(expression,
NumberStyles.Integer,
NumberFormatInfo.CurrentInfo,
out dVal);
if( dVal > Int32.MaxValue || dVal < Int32.MinValue )
{
iIntVal = 0;
bRes = false;
}
else
iIntVal = Convert.ToInt32(dVal);
return bRes;
}
As you can see, this method both tests if the string is a valid integer (Int32), and if so, converts the value using the out parameter.
Regarding your results (compared to mine):
Are you sure the data for VB's IsNumeric is correct? During my tests it shows the same performance as try-catch blocks. I’ve read that IsNumeric uses try/catch itself, so it’s merely a wrapper.
The execution time for the Regular Expression method increases quite dramatically when I increase the length of the input string and the faulty character is at the end.
Also worth mention, I did a test with 1 million strings where 2% where faulty (i.e. non-numbers). The performance between a try-catch block function and a TryParse-based function was negligible. So in the real life (where you won’t find 100% correct nor 100% erroneous data), the result looks quite different!
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Title:
Have to be careful
Name:
Steve Maier
Date:
11/16/2005 11:38:30 AM
Comment:
One thing to remember tho with the incremental character approach is localization. some places use ',' for the decimal point and '.' for the grouping character. With the Parse and TryParse methods, they can take the culture value and will parse things correctly.
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Title:
Nice reading!
Name:
Peter Hartlén
Date:
11/16/2005 10:16:27 AM
Comment:
Thanks, this was exactly what I was looking for!
I'm using Compact Framework and for example Int32.TryParse is not available, it would be interesting to see the performance of Double.TryParse (using NumberFormat.Integer), with a cast to Int32. I will try this using your code!
Thanks again!
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Title:
Thanks for the article !
Name:
Deon
Date:
11/2/2005 8:43:18 AM
Comment:
Great article.
Thanks for the effort
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Title:
Ms.
Name:
Ututu
Date:
8/9/2005 12:32:04 PM
Comment:
Very good article, thanks a lot.
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Title:
Try-Catch
Name:
J. Ambrose Little
Date:
7/20/2005 8:13:44 AM
Comment:
Try-catch statements are integral to a good program, but they should only be used where they need to be used. There are some good topics on Exception Management in the MSDN Library that you should review to better understand.
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Title:
Mr.
Name:
Ram Kinkar Pandey
Date:
7/20/2005 5:24:46 AM
Comment:
I was just Looking why using try..catch in ASP.NET is bad idea. This article makes this very clear to me.
Thank you
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Title:
Mr.
Name:
Linanga Keeba
Date:
7/18/2005 2:23:36 PM
Comment:
The article assisted me very much. Thanks.
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