Re: atoi-like function: is there a better way to do this?

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 2:50 PM, David Johnston <polobo(at)yahoo(dot)com> wrote:
> Any efficient, non-RegEx, alternative would require more context to evaluate than you provide.  Mainly, would it be faster to have a separate field to store the parsed (at input) number and then query that field directly (even if it is a text field as well)?  Basically cache the parse.

Caching's looking tempting, but I don't know if it'll be worth it
(these fields won't be searched-as-int very often compared to
search-as-string, and there's potentially a lot of such fields). All I
need out of it is the leading digits - I can strip them with trim(),
but I can't keep _only_ those digits.

The other possibility that may be of value is to write the function in
C instead of pl/pgsql, which will then actually call atoi() itself. Is
that going to be a better option?

ChrisA