Optimize CSS expressions produced by Nokogiri

Nokogiri produces inefficient XPath expressions when given CSS
expressions such as "a.gfm". Luckily these expressions can be optimized
quite easily while still achieving the same results.

In the two cases where this optimization is applied the run time has
been reduced from around 170 ms to around 15 ms.

1 files changed, 18 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/lib/banzai/querying.rb b/lib/banzai/querying.rb
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..1e1b51e683e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/lib/banzai/querying.rb
@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+module Banzai
+  module Querying
+    # Searches a Nokogiri document using a CSS query, optionally optimizing it
+    # whenever possible.
+    #
+    # document - A document/element to search.
+    # query    - The CSS query to use.
+    #
+    # Returns a Nokogiri::XML::NodeSet.
+    def self.css(document, query)
+      # When using "a.foo" Nokogiri compiles this to "//a[...]" but
+      # "descendant::a[...]" is quite a bit faster and achieves the same result.
+      xpath = Nokogiri::CSS.xpath_for(query)[0].gsub(%r{^//}, 'descendant::')
+
+      document.xpath(xpath)
+    end
+  end
+end