Zugg Software :: View topic - Optimization question (replace vs subregex vs ???)

Newbie Joined: 21 Mar 2006 Posts: 2

Hi everyone,

I have a large map created for a mud that I play. Recently I've been
going through my scripts doing optimizing at the largest bottlenecks.
I'm hoping someone can see if there is a better way to optimize the
following. This is an example output from %walk.

.5n3e2s;.(open west;w)2nw;.n;.(open north;n);w;.3n2e;.(say apple);.(say orange)

Now, the mud uses a 'run' command to execute long paths quickly. So
any move > 1 room I use run ns, instead of .ns. I need to convert the
above to a "|" delimited list. So it would look like the following...

run 5n3e2s|open west|w|run 2nw|n|open north|n|w|run 3n2e|say apple|say orange

I currently accomplish this with a nested replace...

#if %begins( @sw_temp, ".(") {#var sw_temp {%right( @sw_temp, 2)}}
#if %ends( @sw_temp, ")") {#var sw_temp {%leftback( @sw_temp, 1)}}
#var sw_temp {%replace( %replace( %replace( %replace( %replace( @sw_temp, ")", "|."), ";.(", "|"), ";", "|"), ".|", ""), ".", "run ")}

I've also tried using subregex, along the lines of ...

#if (!%begins( @sw_temp, ".(") and !%null( @sw_temp)) {#var sw_temp %concat( "run ", @sw_temp)}
#var sw_temp %subregex( %subregex( %subregex( @sw_temp, "\)", "|run "), "\;", "|"), "[\.\(\)]", "")
#if %ends( @sw_temp, "|run ") {#var sw_temp {%leftback( @sw_temp, 5)}}

sw_temp in both cases is just the example %walk output posted above.
During testing I've copied that example onto itself and created a very
large test variable. I've found that using subregex is 3x slower than
the replace method. I figured it would have been faster.

Either way...can anyone think of a better/faster way to accomplish
this task? I've considered creating a custom loop, but just think that
the number of %copy, %concat etc I'd have to do will be overwhelmingly
slower than the replace method.

Is there any known way to change the way %walk formats its output? It
is quite ugly and hard to deal with.

Thanks for your help.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

Try %exec.

Newbie Joined: 21 Mar 2006 Posts: 2