how to avoid leading white spaces

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Roy Smith (Thu, 02 Jun 2011 21:57:16 -0400)
> In article <94ph22FrhvU5 at mid.individual.net>,
>  Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
> > On 2011-06-01, rurpy at yahoo.com <rurpy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > For some odd reason (perhaps because they are used a lot in
> > > Perl), this groups seems to have a great aversion to regular
> > > expressions. Too bad because this is a typical problem where
> > > their use is the best solution.
> > 
> > Python's str methods, when they're sufficent, are usually more
> > efficient.
> 
> I was all set to say, "prove it!" when I decided to try an experiment.  
> Much to my surprise, for at least one common case, this is indeed 
> correct.
> [...]
> t1 = timeit.Timer("'laoreet' in text",
>                  "text = '%s'" % text)
> t2 = timeit.Timer("pattern.search(text)",
>                   "import re; pattern = re.compile('laoreet'); text = 
> '%s'" % text)
> print t1.timeit()
> print t2.timeit()
> -------------------------------------------------
> ./contains.py
> 0.990975856781
> 1.91417002678
> -------------------------------------------------

Strange that a lot of people (still) automatically associate 
"efficiency" with "takes two seconds to run instead of one" (which I 
guess no one really cares about).

Efficiency is much better measured in which time it saves you to write 
and maintain the code in a readable way.

Thorsten