replace - Is there an efficient way to perform hundreds of text substitutions in Ruby?

Question

I'm trying to use a list of hundreds of common misspellings to clean some input before searching for duplicates.

It's a time-critical process, so I'm hoping that there's a quicker way than having hundreds of regexes (or one with a hundred branches).

Is there an efficient way to perform hundreds of text substitutions in Ruby?

Answer 1

An alternative approach, if your input data is separated words, would simply be to build a hash table of {error => correction}.

Hash table lookup is fast, so if you can bend your input data to this format, it will almost certainly be fast enough.