strptime performance

[Delaney, Timothy C (Timothy)]

> From: John Roth [mailto:newsgroups at jhrothjr.com]
> 
> "George Trojan" <george.trojan at noaa.gov> wrote in message
> news:bo6oaf$vfq$1 at news.nems.noaa.gov...
> > Is time.strptime() intrinsically slow and should be avoided whenever
> > possible? I have the following code in my application:
> 
> According to the "what's new in Python" for 2.3, the strptime
> implementation was switched from a lightweight wrapper
> around the frequently buggy and incompatible C library
> to a portable pure Python implementation.

Note also in 2.3.1 (and later) ...

"Caching in _strptime.py has been re-introduced. This leads to a large performance boost at the cost of not being thread-safe from locale changes while executing time.strptime()".

> Yes, it's going to be a lot slower.

Now that's an assumption you shouldn't be making until you've timed it.

Tim Delaney