Requesting help on fast handling of string of 'char'

If you are doing text processing/parsing - you could consider using
GNU Bison[^]
and
flex[^]

Remeber that you can use flex on its own, and it is reasonably fast :)

Apart from that, I think you will find that nothing beats using pointers, and possibly reading files using ReadFile with OS page sized chunks or memory mapped IO.

If you want to continue using std::string; remember to pass by reference, and remember that you have access to the string contents using the const char* string.c_str() const function.

Regards
Espen Harlinn

It depends on which operations you do most often on the string.

One problem can be the way std::string is implemented: just try another STL implementation, like stlport[^]
They use reference counted string, thus removing lot of buffer copy.

Another can be the fact you do frequent insertion and deletion in the middle of the strings.
If so, string (that is: a buffer of memory-consecutive characters) is not as efficient.
Try std::rope [^]instead .

A discussion about the difference can be found here[^]

For optimal performance, use char[xx] variables and pointers and avoid making many copies of the strings. Concat in place, and split with pointers or array of pointers, nulling out the split characters in place.