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This week I’m trying to break the skids off of Markaby. A recent Camping audit has lit up Markaby as the slowpoke. And I happened to root up a bit of slowness in Builder::XChar. The Range.include? is killing us because the Range gets cast to an Array every time!

My friends, in your lives, in your valuable time, do not, in any case, use Range#include? Use Range#===. (0x0000..0xFFFF) === 0xBABE you know it’s true. I have been careless, too.

Here’s a replacement:

 module XChar
 VALID = [
 0x9, 0xA, 0xD,
 (0x20..0xD7FF),
 (0xE000..0xFFFD),
 (0x10000..0x10FFFF)
 ]
 end
 class Fixnum
 # XML escaped version of chr
 def xchr
 n = XChar::CP1252[self] || self
 case n when *XChar::VALID
 XChar::PREDEFINED[n] or (n<128 ? n.chr : "&##{n};")
 else
 '*'
 end
 end
 end

Which gave me a 30% speed up on the tests Atrus was running. The UTF-8 unpack is also taking some time. I wonder.