I know plenty about the different ways of handling parsing text for information. For parsing integers for example, what kind of performance can be expected. I am wondering if anyone knows of any good stats on this. I am looking for some real numbers from someone who has tested this.
Which of these offers the best performance in which situations?
Parse(...) // Crash if the case is extremely rare .0001%
If (SomethingIsValid) // Check the value before parsing
Parse(...)
TryParse(...) // Using TryParse
try
{
Parse(...)
}
catch
{
// Catch any thrown exceptions
}
Always use T.TryParse(string str, out T value). Throwing exceptions is expensive and should be avoided if you can handle the situation a priori. Using a try-catch block to "save" on performance (because your invalid data rate is low) is an abuse of exception handling at the expense of maintainability and good coding practices. Follow sound software engineering development practices, write your test cases, run your application, THEN benchmark and optimize.
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%" -Donald Knuth
Therefore you assign, arbitrarily like in carbon credits, that the performance of try-catch is worse and that the performance of TryParse is better. Only after we've run our application and determined that we have some sort of slowdown w.r.t. string parsing would we even consider using anything other than TryParse.
(edit: since it appears the questioner wanted timing data to go with good advice, here is the timing data requested)
Times for various failure rates on 10,000 inputs from the user (for the unbelievers):
Failure Rate Try-Catch TryParse Slowdown
0% 00:00:00.0131758 00:00:00.0120421 0.1
10% 00:00:00.1540251 00:00:00.0087699 16.6
20% 00:00:00.2833266 00:00:00.0105229 25.9
30% 00:00:00.4462866 00:00:00.0091487 47.8
40% 00:00:00.6951060 00:00:00.0108980 62.8
50% 00:00:00.7567745 00:00:00.0087065 85.9
60% 00:00:00.7090449 00:00:00.0083365 84.1
70% 00:00:00.8179365 00:00:00.0088809 91.1
80% 00:00:00.9468898 00:00:00.0088562 105.9
90% 00:00:01.0411393 00:00:00.0081040 127.5
100% 00:00:01.1488157 00:00:00.0078877 144.6
/// <param name="errorRate">Rate of errors in user input</param>
/// <returns>Total time taken</returns>
public static TimeSpan TimeTryCatch(double errorRate, int seed, int count)
{
Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
Random random = new Random(seed);
string bad_prefix = @"X";
stopwatch.Start();
for(int ii = 0; ii < count; ++ii)
{
string input = random.Next().ToString();
if (random.NextDouble() < errorRate)
{
input = bad_prefix + input;
}
int value = 0;
try
{
value = Int32.Parse(input);
}
catch(FormatException)
{
value = -1; // we would do something here with a logger perhaps
}
}
stopwatch.Stop();
return stopwatch.Elapsed;
}
/// <param name="errorRate">Rate of errors in user input</param>
/// <returns>Total time taken</returns>
public static TimeSpan TimeTryParse(double errorRate, int seed, int count)
{
Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
Random random = new Random(seed);
string bad_prefix = @"X";
stopwatch.Start();
for(int ii = 0; ii < count; ++ii)
{
string input = random.Next().ToString();
if (random.NextDouble() < errorRate)
{
input = bad_prefix + input;
}
int value = 0;
if (!Int32.TryParse(input, out value))
{
value = -1; // we would do something here with a logger perhaps
}
}
stopwatch.Stop();
return stopwatch.Elapsed;
}
public static void TimeStringParse()
{
double errorRate = 0.1; // 10% of the time our users mess up
int count = 10000; // 10000 entries by a user
TimeSpan trycatch = TimeTryCatch(errorRate, 1, count);
TimeSpan tryparse = TimeTryParse(errorRate, 1, count);
Console.WriteLine("trycatch: {0}", trycatch);
Console.WriteLine("tryparse: {0}", tryparse);
}
Although I haven't personally profiled the different ways, this chap has:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ianhu/archive/2005/12/19/505702.aspx
Try-Catch will always be the slower. TryParse will be faster.
The IF and TryParse are the same.
Here's another chap who's also profiled the performance differences, and does so with a few different data types to see how much (if at all) they inherently affect the performance: int, bool, and DateTime.
Option 1: Will throw an exception on bad data.
Option 2: SomethingIsValid() could be quite expensive - particularly if you are pre-checking a string for Integer parsability.
Option 3: I like this. You need a null check afterwards, but it's pretty cheap.
Option 4 is definitely the worst.
Exception handling is comparatively expensive, so avoid it if you can.
In particular, bad inputs are to be expected, not exceptional, so you shouldn't use them for this situation.
(Although, before TryParse, It may have been the best option.)
