PADDED STRING - TREATING STRING AS SEQUENCE OF MACHINE WORDS

Abstract

A string is a sequence of characters. The operations such as copy and comparison on strings are usually performed character by character. This note presents a data type called padded string, a string type with faster operations. A padded string is a sequence of machine words. For 32-bit machines, four characters can be operated in one machine instruction. Operations on padded strings can then run faster than traditional strings such as char* in C language. An experiment sorting an array of strings shows speedup 24% using padded string.