Fast conversion of numbers to numerator/denominator pairs
Peter Otten
__peter__ at web.de
Sat Aug 24 08:52:59 EDT 2013
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> I have a need to convert arbitrary non-complex numbers into numerator/
> denominator pairs. Numbers could be ints, floats, Fractions or Decimals.
> For example:
>
> 2 => (2, 1)
> 0.25 => (1, 4)
> Fraction(2, 3) => (2, 3)
> Decimal("0.5") => (1, 2)
>
>
> The first three cases are easy and fast:
>
> # ints and Fractions
> number.numerator, number.denominator
>
> # floats are a little slower
> number.as_integer_ratio()
>
>
> But Decimals are unfortunately slower. MUCH slower, about 40 times slower
> than Fractions in Python 3.3:
>
> tmp = Fraction.from_decimal(number)
> (tmp.numerator, tmp.denominator)
>
>
> This ends up being the bottleneck in my code: once you include the
> scaffolding code to select the right conversion method, processing a
> large list of Decimals is about fifty times slower than large lists of
> floats or fractions.
>
> Is there a fast way to convert a Decimal into a pair of numbers numerator/
> denominator? It *must* be exact, but it doesn't have to be simplest form.
> For example, Decimal("0.5") => (5, 10) would be okay, although (1, 2)
> would be preferred.
>
>
> I've tried this function:
>
> def convert(d):
> sign, digits, exp = d.as_tuple()
> num = int(''.join([str(digit) for digit in digits]))
> if sign: num = -num
> return num, 10**-exp
>
>
> which is faster, but not fast enough. Any suggestions?
Maybe these micro-optimisations will be sufficient:
_trans = bytes.maketrans(bytes(range(10)), b"0123456789")
def convert(d):
sign, digits, exp = d.as_tuple()
num = int(bytes(digits).translate(_trans))
if sign:
num = -num
return num, 10**-exp
You can get the "simplest form" with co-prime numerator and denominator by
dividing by fractions.gcd(), but that will of course slow down things.
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