Motivation / Background

This Pull Request has been created because I want to make some of the most common Faker generators a bit faster, to improve the performance of my test suite and database seeds at work :)

The changes in this PR were generated using Claude Code w/ Fable 5. They have been reviewed and tested by me for correctness.

The changes in this PR include:

• fetch/fetch_all: detect regex-shaped values with start_with?/end_with? instead of two Regexp matches (which allocate MatchData) per fetch.
• parse: skip the token scan entirely when the fetched value doesn't have interpolation, plain values can go straight to numerify.
• Name.first_name: call parse once instead of twice when the result is non-empty.

I can split these changes up further into separate PRs if desired.

Additional information

Benchmark (Ruby 3.4.9, arm64-darwin25, benchmark-ips):

require 'benchmark/ips'
require 'faker'

Benchmark.ips do |x|
  x.config(warmup: 1, time: 2)
  x.report('Name.first_name') { Faker::Name.first_name }
  x.report('Name.name') { Faker::Name.name }
  x.report('Address.city') { Faker::Address.city }
end

Results:

main:        Name.first_name  30.582k (+/-15.3%) i/s
             Name.name        18.900k (+/- 1.2%) i/s
             Address.city     21.428k (+/- 4.6%) i/s
this commit: Name.first_name  61.882k (+/-14.6%) i/s  (~2.0x)
             Name.name        28.181k (+/- 0.7%) i/s  (~1.5x)
             Address.city     30.575k (+/- 0.7%) i/s  (~1.4x)

Checklist

Before submitting the PR make sure the following are checked:

• This Pull Request is related to one change. Changes that are unrelated should be opened in separate PRs.
• Commit message has a detailed description of what changed and why. If this PR fixes a related issue include it in the commit message. Ex: [Fix #issue-number]
• Tests are added or updated if you fix a bug, refactor something, or add a feature.
• Tests and Rubocop are passing before submitting your proposed changes.

If you're proposing a new generator or locale:

• Double-check the existing generators documentation to make sure the new generator you want to add doesn't already exist.
• You've reviewed and followed the Contributing guidelines.