What is the fastest way to check if a string matches a regular expression in Ruby?
My problem is that I have to "egrep" through a huge list of strings to find which are the ones that match a regexp that is given at runtime. I only care about whether the string matches the regexp, not where it matches, nor what the content of the matching groups is. I hope this assumption can be used to reduce the amount of time my code spend matching regexps.
I load the regexp with
pattern = Regexp.new(ptx).freeze
I have found that string =~ pattern is slightly faster than string.match(pattern).
Are there other tricks or shortcuts that can used to make this test even faster?