Re^4: To Single Quote or to Double Quote: a benchmark

[Anonymous Monk]

You see a consistent win for single quotes,

Actually, I don't. In 2 out of the 5 benchmarks, I see "double no $" beat "single no $".

The fact that "double" is slower than "single" comes partially because "single" is one character shorter than "double" (if I add a single space to "single", it takes about 3% longer), and for the rest because processing a backslash in a double quoted string means checking more cases than in a single quoted string.

[eric256]

If you read my post you'll see I added the "no $" after the original post. Ignoring those cases the single quote wins. You can blame the extra character if you want but i beleive that is the whole point here. If you use double quotes then you have to escape characters and it makes a noticable difference in speed. You should also have noticed that I mentioned the speed gain is minimal at very best. There is no reason at all to use these speed tests in a design choice.

for the rest because processing a backslash in a double quoted string means checking more cases than in a single quoted string. Isn't that realy the point that I was showing. Double quotes ARE slower because of the restrictions they impose, but they are only slower if it actualy contains something that needs escaped. Is that speed difference important? I would say not in normal use, but maybe for some special case.

[Anonymous Monk]

Double quotes ARE slower because of the restrictions they impose, but they are only slower if it actualy contains something that needs escaped.

Indeed, but let's go back to where it all started, shall we? Here's what the OP wrote:

On occasions such as those when you don't care about the special properties of either single or double quotes, which is the best to use.

Which to me means, the OP is talking about strings which don't have characters that are special - where the syntax of having single or double quotes doesn't matter. Obviously, if you have scalar or array sigils, or backslashes, the special properties of single or double quotes do matter - and are not the occasions we are talking about.