Question on periods in strings

[Philip Bloom]

Hello, this is my first time posting to the list, but my curiosity here
is great.

I was randomly toying with file writes and I ran into something that
seemed quite odd to me.  When a period is in a string, file write takes
about double the time.  I saw similar things with newlines, but I
figured that was because it was doing a lookup on the escape-d n.  All
other symbols seem to not have this problem, so I'm curious what's
special about periods that they take so much longer to write to file.

#Done in python 2.6.1
#runs in 5.8 seconds.

from datetime import datetime

testvar2='9a00'

startTime = datetime.now()

for var in range(10000000):

    filehandle.write(testvar2)

filehandle.close()

print (datetime.now() - startTime)

 

 

#runs in 10.9 seconds.

from datetime import datetime

testvar2='9.00'

startTime = datetime.now()

for var in range(10000000):

    filehandle.write(testvar2)

filehandle.close()

print (datetime.now() - startTime)

Thank you to any who answer for assuaging my curiosity.


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