Newbie tip: Prg speed from ~5 hrs to < 1 minute

[Terry Byrne]

John,

Re: pass, I stand corrected, of course. Thank you. It just happened to
appear to do exactly the thing I needed in that context. But in other
contexts, ...

As for assigning aLine=None, then trying to work with aLine, I must
plead accidental mis-paste. I threw my post together by copying and
pasting from numerous versions of the eventual product, that one got
in there by mistake!

Terry

sjmachin at lexicon.net (John Machin) wrote in message news:<c76ff6fc.0204291406.4bd58af5 at posting.google.com>...
> TerryByrne1963 at yahoo.com (Terry Byrne) wrote in message news:<93d52e82.0204290618.349a0e5f at posting.google.com>...
> 
> [big snip]
> > 
> > At first I was just running the re.search on each line. Time: ~ 5 hrs
> > for 60K line log file. Started testing with the string.find method to
> > make sure a certain error code appeared on the line before running the
> > "expensive" re.search, and that cut execution time from ~5 hrs to ~
> > 1.5 hrs, good but "no cigar," as they say.
> > 
> > Then I realized that each line of content could be treated the same as
> > you'd treat a switch() structure in C, or a case structure in Pascal:
> > if one option is a "hit", then you needn't even check for all the
> > other options. So I started pass-ing to the next line of the content
> > whenever I got a "hit."
> 
> Please re-read your source of information on the pass statement.
> "pass" does nothing. Zip. Zilch. It is only a place holder for cases
> where you want to do nix but Python syntax insists on a statement
> being present. Here are a couple of use cases:
> 
> class FubarError(Exception):
>    pass
> 
> if a and b or c and d:
>    pass
> else:
>    # Late at night, don't want to try inverting
>    # the above in my head, don't like not (...)
>    do_something()
> 
> You can experiment with pass's 'functionality', by putting something
> like the following in a file and running it from the command-line:
> 
> for i in range(5):
>    print i
>    pass
>    print 'Still here!'
>    pass
>    print 'Persistent little varmint ...'
>    pass
>    print 'Now do you believe Uncle John?'
> 
> Then change all occurences of 'pass' to '# pass' and see what happens.
> Then change all the occurrences of '# pass' to 'continue' and see what
> happens.
> 
> > That cut my time down to under a minute for a
> > 60K-line log file.
> 
> Let's have a look at the following snippet of your code:
> 
> >      idx = aLine.find('Error Validator:2420')
> >      if idx > -1:
> >        LINKS_VNOQUERYHITS += 1
> >        aLine += '<br>'
> >        rfHandle.write(aLine)
> >        aLine = None 
> >        idx = -1
> >        pass
> >      idx = aLine.find('Error Validator:2412')
> >      if idx > -1:
> 
> This just cannot possibly be working [or maybe this code isn't even
> executed at all!!!]. You bind aLine to None then attempt to execute
> idx = aLine.find('...') which will cause an exception:
> 
> AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'find'
> 
> ... unless of course previously you have done
> 
> None = ""
> 
> which needless(?) to say is something you should *never* do.
> 
> If you can't find out why this is happening yourself, it's time to
> head for the  tutor list.
> 
> All those lines which bind idx to -1 are pointless. Try changing all
> of them firstly to idx = -99999999 and secondly to idx = 99999999. If
> either of those makes any difference at all (except a tiny increase in
> the run-time) then something drastic has happened: Python is stuffed,
> your copy of Python is stuffed, ...
> 
> HTH,
> John