"Gregory P. Smith" greg@electricrain.com wrote:
I've never liked the "".join([]) idiom for string concatenation; in my opinion it violates the principles "Beautiful is better than ugly." and "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.". (And perhaps several others.) To that end I've submitted patch #1569040 to SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1569040&gro... This patch speeds up using + for string concatenation.
yay! i'm glad to see this. i hate the "".join syntax. i still write that as string.join() because thats at least readable). it also fixes the python idiom for fast string concatenation as intended; anyone whos ever written code that builds a large string value by pushing substrings into a list only to call join later should agree.
mystr = "prefix" while bla: #... mystr += moredata
Regardless of "nicer to read", I would just point out that Guido has stated that Python will not have strings implemented as trees. Also, Python 3.x will have a data type called 'bytes', which will be the default return of file.read() (when files are opened as binary), which uses an over-allocation strategy like lists to get relatively fast concatenation (on the order of lst1 += lst2).
- Josiah