string literal vs string variable

[Kee Nethery]

On Aug 22, 2009, at 3:32 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote:

>
> You can use both, but I suspect parsing from StringIO to be slower  
> than
> parsing from the string directly. That's the case for lxml, at least.
>
> Note that fromstring() behaves the same as XML(), but it reads  
> better when
> parsing from a string variable. XML() reads better when parsing from a
> literal string.

I'm not sure I know the difference between a string variable and a  
literal string. Is the difference as simple as:

somestring = u'<stuff>hello world</stuff>'
fromstring(somestring)  <-- string variable
vs
XML(u'<stuff>hello world</stuff>')  <-- literal string

Kee