case-insensitive-match: A simplified, faster way to do case-insensitive matching.

case-insensitive-match 0.1.1.0

Here is a simplified library for matching and comparing strings in a case-insensitive manner. The only dependencies are base, bytestring and text.

Usage is simple

-- normal string comparison
"href"    /=  "HREF"
"apples"  /=  "oranges"
"Smith"   <   "Jones

-- case-insensitive comparison
"href"    ^== "HREF"
"appples" ^/= "oranges"
"jones"   ^<  "Smith"

-- sorting some data structurue
get_names p = (last_name p,first_name p)
sortBy (caseInsensitiveComparing get_names) people

Benchmarks

The benchmarks are pretty comprehensive, offering comparisons with other algorithms, including the case-insensitive package and simple case folding using the base package. Before simply running the bench-others executable, check the source code or you'll end up with a long series of 360 benchmark tests. You'll want something like bench-others -m glob ByteString/Short/*/*, which runs only 36 benchmarks. The heirarchy is <data-type>/<string-length>/<match-type>/<algorithm>. As usual, performance comparisons depend heavily on use-cases, but for matching shorter strings that are often unequal this algorithm is clearly fastest.

There is also a real-world bench test that compares different algorithms while looking for links in an HTML file with Text.HTML.TagSoup. This bench involves a lot of work other than string comparison, so the differences between algorithms is slim, but usually measurable. Build an run:

$ cabal build bench-tagsoup
...

$ curl -s 'https://hackage.haskell.org/packages/names' > sample/hackage-names.html
$ dist/build/bench-tagsoup/bench-tagsoup < sample/hackage-names.html
...

Testing

It would be quite involved to build a perfectly comprehensive testing module, but the test-basics executable is tests multiple cases against all supported data types.

Sample

Here is a sample:

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

module Main ( main ) where

import           Data.List
import           Data.CaseInsensitive
import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as BS

main = do
    stdin <- BS.getContents
    let sorted_names = map join_name $ sortBy caseInsensitiveCompare $ map split_name $ BS.lines stdin
    mapM_ BS.putStrLn sorted_names


split_name name = (last,BS.drop 2 first)
    where (last,first) = BS.span (/= ',') name

join_name (last,first) = BS.concat [ last , ", " , first ]

Try it with:

$ cabal build readme-sample
...

$ dist/build/readme-sample/readme-sample < sample/declaration-signers.txt