I ran into a rather surprising little problem earlier this week that I felt bore documenting. It turns out that the “simple” Rails strip_tags helper is massive overkill when you just want to strip markup out of a document. It offers a lot of functionality, but it comes at a pretty ugly performance cost.

Here’s the call graph for #strip_tags (as profiled in an application I’m working on). As you can see, it tokenizes the entire string, and then iterates the tokens, likely pushing and popping sections onto and off of a stack as tags are opened and closed.

This is a lot more than a quick little regex to strip out tags; it’s actually parsing the full HTML document. Fortunately, there are already tools to do that, and they have their slow parts written as C extensions. Nokogiri is my weapon of choice in this regard - it’s battle-tested and generally rocks at parsing markup, even when it’s poorly-formed.

So, let’s benchmark a “strip all the markup out of a string” use case with #strip_tags and nokogiri.

require 'rubygems'
require 'action_view'
require 'nokogiri'

include ActionView::Helpers::SanitizeHelper

f = open("news").read

LOOPS = 1000
Benchmark.bmbm do |x|
  x.report("strip_tags") { LOOPS.times { strip_tags f }}
  x.report("nokogiri") { LOOPS.times { Nokogiri::HTML(f).text }}
end

The data file in this case is a snapshot of the current page of Hacker News. It’s a 23kb HTML file. Nothing too huge, but certainly not small, either. Let’s run it through the benchmark:

[chris@luna projects]$ ruby strip.rb
Rehearsal ----------------------------------------------
strip_tags  33.070000   0.010000  33.080000 ( 33.092638)
nokogiri     3.220000   0.020000   3.240000 (  3.241090)
------------------------------------ total: 36.320000sec

                 user     system      total        real
strip_tags  33.010000   0.010000  33.020000 ( 33.056551)
nokogiri     3.190000   0.000000   3.190000 (  3.200680)

Yikes. It’s not just slower, it’s ~10x slower.

Don’t use strip_tags. Also, profile your code. But just because it’s convenient doesn’t mean you should use it.