Speed Optimization Tip: Only Use Regular Expression if Necessary

Making your automation scripts faster.

Regular Expressions are a powerful and valuable pattern matching tool for strings. My father wrote an article on using Regular Expression (Regex) in automated test scripts.

Use Regular Expressions in Test Automation

In this short article, I will show you one aspect of using Regular Expression: it’s slow. When there are other ways you can accomplish pattern matching in a big loop, avoid using Regex.

The topic of this exercise is to analyse E2E test script files, recursively in a folder.

• test script files, end with _spec.rb or _test.rb
• page classes, end with _page.rb .
• helpers, end with _helper.rb .

Also in a test script file, we will count the number of test cases (one test script may contain one or more test cases), which start with it and end with do.

Let me show you the results (in terms of speed) first.