search for: load_file1

Hello Rubyists, I am a bit stumped here. I want to extend the ''load_file'' method in the YAML module. Following along with the PickAxe example of making old methods do new things, I try this in irb: >> module YAML >> alias_method :orig_load_f, :load_file >> def load_file(*args) >> contents = orig_load_f(*args) >>

...ally fast. However, it returns a long character string, where I really want numeric values. I can use as.numeric(strsplit()), but to my complete surprise it is faster to run scan() on this text string. Consider the following comparison (I use the command line wc to optimize the memory allocation), load_file1 <- function(f){ ## ask wc the number of words n <- scan(textConnection(system(paste("wc -w ", f), intern=TRUE)), what=list(integer(), character()), quiet=TRUE)[[1]] all <- scan(f, nmax=n, quiet=TRUE) invisible(all) } load_file2 <- function(f){ ## ask wc...