Clarify concatenation behaviour of immutable strings, and remove explicit

mention of the CPython optimization hack.
This commit is contained in:
Antoine Pitrou 2011-11-25 16:34:23 +01:00
commit e333d00d3a
2 changed files with 37 additions and 8 deletions

View file

@ -989,6 +989,32 @@ What does 'UnicodeDecodeError' or 'UnicodeEncodeError' error mean?
See the :ref:`unicode-howto`.
What is the most efficient way to concatenate many strings together?
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:class:`str` and :class:`bytes` objects are immutable, therefore concatenating
many strings together is inefficient as each concatenation creates a new
object. In the general case, the total runtime cost is quadratic in the
total string length.
To accumulate many :class:`str` objects, the recommended idiom is to place
them into a list and call :meth:`str.join` at the end::
chunks = []
for s in my_strings:
chunks.append(s)
result = ''.join(chunks)
(another reasonably efficient idiom is to use :class:`io.StringIO`)
To accumulate many :class:`bytes` objects, the recommended idiom is to extend
a :class:`bytearray` object using in-place concatenation (the ``+=`` operator)::
result = bytearray()
for b in my_bytes_objects:
result += b
Sequences (Tuples/Lists)
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