In this new post series we'll show highlights of Swift Talk , our subscription video series. Today, we'll show a very nice trick by Ole Begemann to increase String processing performance.

In Swift Talk 79 , we try to improve CSV string parsing performance by measuring time and comparing the performance of various techniques. To write a performance test, we wrap the parsing of the loaded string in an XCTest measure block:

								func testPerformance() {
    let bundle = Bundle(for: ParseCSVTests.self)
    let url = bundle.url(forResource: "small", withExtension: "txt")!
    let data = try! Data(contentsOf: url)
    let string = String(data: data, encoding: .isoLatin1)!

    measure {
        _ = parse(lines: string)
    }
}

							

The change is a rather obscure tip we got from Ole:

								let string = String(data: data, encoding: .isoLatin1)! + ""

							

When we append an empty string to the test string, we get a performance improvement of 18 percent:

The reason for the performance gain: a string can be backed by a Swift String or an NSString . By appending an empty string, we force it to be backed by a Swift String , with which our algorithm works much faster.

In the remainder of the episode, we also show a technique suggested by Matt Gallagher from Cocoa with Love , and increase performance by another 83%. The episode and transcript are available for subscribers, and are part of the Swift, The Language collection.