C++ most efficient way to convert string to int (faster than atoi)

Question

As mentioned in the title, I\'m looking for something that can give me more performance than atoi. Presently, the fastest way I know is

atoi(mystring.c_str(         


        

Answer 1

Paddy's implementation of fast_atoi is faster than atoi - without the shadow of the doubt - however it works only for unsigned integers.

Below, I put evaluated version of Paddy's fast_atoi that also allows only unsigned integers but speeds conversion up even more by replacing costly operation * with +

unsigned int fast_atou(const char *str)
{
    unsigned int val = 0;
    while(*str) {
        val = (val << 1) + (val << 3) + *(str++) - 48;
    }
    return val;
}

Here, I put complete version of fast_atoi() that i'm using sometimes which converts singed integers as well:

int fast_atoi(const char *buff)
{
    int c = 0, sign = 0, x = 0;
    const char *p = buff;

    for(c = *(p++); (c < 48 || c > 57); c = *(p++)) {if (c == 45) {sign = 1; c = *(p++); break;}}; // eat whitespaces and check sign
    for(; c > 47 && c < 58; c = *(p++)) x = (x << 1) + (x << 3) + c - 48;

    return sign ? -x : x;
} 

Answer 2

The only definitive answer is with checking with your compiler, your real data.

Something I'd try (even if it's using memory accesses so it may be slow depending on caching) is

int value = t1[s[n-1]];
if (n > 1) value += t10[s[n-2]]; else return value;
if (n > 2) value += t100[s[n-3]]; else return value;
if (n > 3) value += t1000[s[n-4]]; else return value;
... continuing for how many digits you need to handle ...

if t1, t10 and so on are statically allocated and constant the compiler shouldn't fear any aliasing and the machine code generated should be quite decent.

Answer 3

atoi can be improved upon significantly, given certain assumptions. This was demonstrated powerfully in a presentation by Andrei Alexandrescu at the C++ and Beyond 2012 conference. Hi s replacement used loop unrolling and ALU parallelism to achieve orders of magnitude in perf improvement. I don't have his materials, but this link uses a similar technique: http://tombarta.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/specializing-atoi/

Answer 4

I experimented with solutions using lookup tables, but found them fraught with issues, and actually not very fast. The fastest solution turned out to be the least imaginitive:

int fast_atoi( const char * str )
{
    int val = 0;
    while( *str ) {
        val = val*10 + (*str++ - '0');
    }
    return val;
}

Running a benchmark with a million randomly generated strings:

fast_atoi : 0.0097 seconds
atoi      : 0.0414 seconds

To be fair, I also tested this function by forcing the compiler not to inline it. The results were still good:

fast_atoi : 0.0104 seconds
atoi      : 0.0426 seconds

Provided your data conforms to the requirements of the fast_atoi function, that is pretty reasonable performance. The requirements are:

1. Input string contains only numeric characters, or is empty
2. Input string represents a number from 0 up to INT_MAX