Does any one know of a faster method to do String.Split()?

It should be pointed out that split() is a questionable approach for parsing CSV files in case you come across commas in the file eg:

1,"Something, with a comma",2,3

The other thing I'll point out without knowing how you profiled is be careful about profiling this kind of low level detail. The granularity of the Windows/PC timer might come into play and you may have a significant overhead in just looping so use some sort of control value.

That being said, split() is built to handle regular expressions, which are obviously more complex than you need (and the wrong tool to deal with escaped commas anyway). Also, split() creates lots of temporary objects.

So if you want to speed it up (and I have trouble believing that performance of this part is really an issue) then you want to do it by hand and you want to reuse your buffer objects so you're not constantly creating objects and giving the garbage collector work to do in cleaning them up.

The algorithm for that is relatively simple:

• Stop at every comma;
• When you hit quotes continue until you hit the next set of quotes;
• Handle escaped quotes (ie \") and arguably escaped commas (\,).

Oh and to give you some idea of the cost of regex, there was a question (Java not C# but the principle was the same) where someone wanted to replace every n-th character with a string. I suggested using replaceAll() on String. Jon Skeet manually coded the loop. Out of curiosity I compared the two versions and his was an order of magnitude better.

So if you really want performance, it's time to hand parse.

Or, better yet, use someone else's optimized solution like this fast CSV reader.

By the way, while this is in relation to Java it concerns the performance of regular expressions in general (which is universal) and replaceAll() vs a hand-coded loop: Putting char into a java string for each N characters.

Here's a very basic example using ReadOnlySpan. On my machine this takes around 150ns as opposed to string.Split() which takes around 250ns. That's a nice 40% improvement right there.

string serialized = "1577836800;1000;1";
ReadOnlySpan<char> span = serialized.AsSpan();

Trade result = new Trade();

index = span.IndexOf(';');
result.UnixTimestamp = long.Parse(span.Slice(0, index));
span = span.Slice(index + 1);

index = span.IndexOf(';');
result.Price = float.Parse(span.Slice(0, index));
span = span.Slice(index + 1);

index = span.IndexOf(';');
result.Quantity = float.Parse(span.Slice(0, index));

return result;

Note that a ReadOnlySpan.Split() will soon be part of the framework. See https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/295

Depending on use, you can speed this up by using Pattern.split instead of String.split. If you have this code in a loop (which I assume you probably do since it sounds like you are parsing lines from a file) String.split(String regex) will call Pattern.compile on your regex string every time that statement of the loop executes. To optimize this, Pattern.compile the pattern once outside the loop and then use Pattern.split, passing the line you want to split, inside the loop.

Hope this helps

The BCL implementation of string.Split is actually quite fast, I've done some testing here trying to out preform it and it's not easy.

But there's one thing you can do and that's to implement this as a generator:

public static IEnumerable<string> GetSplit( this string s, char c )
{
    int l = s.Length;
    int i = 0, j = s.IndexOf( c, 0, l );
    if ( j == -1 ) // No such substring
    {
        yield return s; // Return original and break
        yield break;
    }

    while ( j != -1 )
    {
        if ( j - i > 0 ) // Non empty? 
        {
            yield return s.Substring( i, j - i ); // Return non-empty match
        }
        i = j + 1;
        j = s.IndexOf( c, i, l - i );
    }

    if ( i < l ) // Has remainder?
    {
        yield return s.Substring( i, l - i ); // Return remaining trail
    }
}

The above method is not necessarily faster than string.Split for small strings but it returns results as it finds them, this is the power of lazy evaluation. If you have long lines or need to conserve memory, this is the way to go.

The above method is bounded by the performance of IndexOf and Substring which does too much index of out range checking and to be faster you need to optimize away these and implement your own helper methods. You can beat the string.Split performance but it's gonna take cleaver int-hacking. You can read my post about that here.