Bottleneck: easy obscurity "encryption" via xor

[Tino Lange]

Hi Irmen, Bengt and Paul!

Thanks a lot for your answer.
Indeed it seems that I chose the slowest possible implementation :-)

I tested all your recepies and I would like to give a short summary of what
I found:

> def xorcrypt_old(str, salt = 255):
>     if salt > 255:
>         raise "Invalid salt! Must be < 255!"
>     return reduce(lambda x,y: operator.add(x, chr(y)), map(lambda char,
_salt = salt: operator.xor(ord(char), _salt), str), "")
> 
> def xorcrypt_irmen1(str, salt = 255):
>     if salt > 255:
>         raise "Invalid salt! Must be < 255!"
>     return ''.join(map(lambda char, _salt = salt:
chr(operator.xor(ord(char), _salt)), str))
> 
> def xorcrypt_irmen2(str, salt = 255):
>     if salt <0 or salt> 255:
>         raise "Invalid salt! Must be 0<=salt<=255!"
>     return ''.join( [ chr(ord(c) ^ salt) for c in str ] )
> 
> def xorcrypt_bengt(str, salt = 255):
>     if salt <0 or salt> 255:
>         raise "Invalid salt! Must be 0<=salt<=255!"
>     translation_table = ''.join( [ chr(c ^ salt) for c in range(255) ])
>     return str.translate(translation_table)
> 
> def xorcrypt_paul(str, salt = 255):
>     if salt <0 or salt> 255:
>         raise "Invalid salt! Must be 0<=salt<=255!"
>     n = len(str)
>     stream = array.array('B', str)
>     for i in xrange(n):
>         stream[i] = stream[i] ^ salt
>     return stream.tostring()


And it seems that Bengt's reciepe is the fastest. For very small strings
(<255 chars) the method irmen2 should be the best choice - it doesn' have
to pre-create the translation-table and does everything on-the-fly.

Have a look at some results:

File with 380303 Bytes
> Old Version  ... 511 seconds -> 744 Bytes/second
> Irmen's 1st Version  ... 4 seconds -> 95075 Bytes/second
> Irmen's 2nd Version  ... 3 seconds -> 126767 Bytes/second
> Bengt's Version  ... 1 seconds -> 380303 Bytes/second
> Paul's Version  ... 1 seconds -> 380303 Bytes/second

File with 6587435 Bytes
> Old Version  ... not tested
> Irmen's 1st Version  ... 71 seconds -> 92780 Bytes/second
> Irmen's 2nd Version  ... 39 seconds -> 168908 Bytes/second
> Bengt's Version  ... 1 seconds -> 6587435 Bytes/second
> Paul's Version  ... 16 seconds -> 411714 Bytes/second

Once again - thanks for your help!
Cheers,

Tino