[Docutils-develop] [docutils:patches] Re: #206 Improve SmartQuote performance

[Günter M. <mi...@us...>]

It turned out that actually "smartquotes" mostly used pre-compiled regexes already but re-did the recompilation with every call to `educateQuotes()`. Replacing these pre-compilations with direct calls allowed Python's caching to kick in and improve performance a bit. Pre-compiling at module import (as proposed in the patch) turned out to further improve, as did simplifying the regular expressions and introducing a preliminary thest for quotes to "educate". 
After theres optimizations, time spent on "smartquotes" went down from 20% of the time "buildhtml.py" requires to build the Docutils documentation to 10%. (Tested with py-spy before the changes, after the changes and with option `--smart-quotes=no`.)


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**[patches:#206] Improve SmartQuote performance**

**Status:** open
**Group:** None
**Created:** Wed Aug 16, 2023 04:37 PM UTC by Chris Sewell
**Last Updated:** Fri Aug 18, 2023 12:31 PM UTC
**Owner:** nobody
**Attachments:**

- [0001-Pre-compile-smartquote-regexes.patch](https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/patches/206/attachment/0001-Pre-compile-smartquote-regexes.patch) (8.3 kB; application/octet-stream)
- [sphinx-build-after.svg](https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/patches/206/attachment/sphinx-build-after.svg) (199.1 kB; image/svg+xml)
- [sphinx-build-before.svg](https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/patches/206/attachment/sphinx-build-before.svg) (282.1 kB; image/svg+xml)


Performing a representative sphinx-build (10 x docutils/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.txt, dummy builder), and analysing with py-spy, you can see from the attached flamegraph that the smartquote transform accouts for over 22% of the build time!

This PR attempts to improve that situation (at least down to 18%) by caching regex compilation 


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