how to fast processing one million strings to remove quotes
Terry Reedy
tjreedy at udel.edu
Wed Aug 2 14:00:12 EDT 2017
On 8/2/2017 1:05 PM, MRAB wrote:
> On 2017-08-02 16:05, Daiyue Weng wrote:
>> Hi, I am trying to removing extra quotes from a large set of strings (a
>> list of strings), so for each original string, it looks like,
>>
>> """str_value1"",""str_value2"",""str_value3"",1,""str_value4"""
>>
>>
>> I like to remove the start and end quotes and extra pairs of quotes on
>> each
>> string value, so the result will look like,
>>
>> "str_value1","str_value2","str_value3",1,"str_value4"
>>
>>
>> and then join each string by a new line.
>>
>> I have tried the following code,
>>
>> for line in str_lines[1:]:
>> strip_start_end_quotes = line[1:-1]
>> splited_line_rem_quotes =
>> strip_start_end_quotes.replace('\"\"', '"')
>> str_lines[str_lines.index(line)] = splited_line_rem_quotes
>>
>> for_pandas_new_headers_str = '\n'.join(splited_lines)
Do you actually need the list of strings joined up like that into one
string, or will the one string just be split again into multiple strings?
>> but it is really slow (running for ages) if the list contains over 1
>> million string lines. I am thinking about a fast way to do that.
>>
> [snip]
>
> The problem is the line:
>
> str_lines[str_lines.index(line)]
>
> It does a linear search through str_lines until time finds a match for
> the line.
>
> To find the 10th line it must search through the first 10 lines.
>
> To find the 100th line it must search through the first 100 lines.
>
> To find the 1000th line it must search through the first 1000 lines.
>
> And so on.
>
> In Big-O notation, the performance is O(n**2).
>
> The Pythonic way of doing it is to put the results into a new list:
>
>
> new_str_lines = str_lines[:1]
>
> for line in str_lines[1:]:
> strip_start_end_quotes = line[1:-1]
> splited_line_rem_quotes = strip_start_end_quotes.replace('\"\"', '"')
> new_str_lines.append(splited_line_rem_quotes)
>
>
> In Big-O notation, the performance is O(n).
Making a slice copy of all but the first member of the list is also
unnecessary. Use an iterator instead.
lineit = iter(str_lines)
new_str_lines = [next(lineit)]
for line in lineit:
...
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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