[Tutor] (no subject)

[Pat Martin]

TLDR; How do you figure out if code is inefficient (if it isn't necessarily
obvious) and how do you find a more efficient solution?

I use code wars sometimes to get some practice with Python, there was a
challenge to compare two strings and if string1 had enough characters to be
rearranged to make string2 return True, otherwise return False.

I wrote a script that was like this:

for i in string1:
    if i not in string2:
        return False
    string2.replace(i,"",1)
return True

This worked but I kept getting that my function was too inefficient and it
took too long. I did a search for the problem and found someone was using
collections.Counter. This basically takes the string and returns the number
of times each character occurs in it. Then just compare the count of one
string to another to see if there is enough of each letter to make the
other string. This seems like an elegant way to do it.

My question is, how do I know something is inefficient and more importantly
how do I go about finding a more efficient solution?

I have just discovered dir() and it has really helped in finding methods
for items but that doesn't help when finding actual packages especially if
I don't know exactly what I am looking for.

Sorry about the long email, not sure if there is even an answer to this
question except maybe write more code and get more experience?

Pat