[Python-3000] Making more effective use of slice objects in Py3k (original) (raw)

Talin talin at acm.org
Thu Aug 31 07:36:43 CEST 2006

Josiah Carlson wrote:

Talin <talin at acm.org> wrote:

The 'characters' data type would be particularly optimized for character-at-a-time operations, i.e. building up a string one character at a time. An example use would be processing escape sequences in strings, where you are transforming the escaped string into its non-escaped equivalent. That is already possible with array.array('H', ...) or array.array('L', ...), depending on the unicode width of your platform. Array performs a more conservative reallocation strategy (1/16 rather than 1/8), but it seems to work well enough. Combine array with wide character support in views, and we could very well have the functionality that you desire.

Well, one of the things I wanted to be able to do is:

'characters += str'

Or more precisely:

token_buf = characters()
token_buf += "example"
token_buf += "\n"
print token_buf
>>> "example\n"

Now, an ordinary list would concatenate the string object onto the end of the list; whereas the character array would concatenate the string characters to the end of the character array. Also note that the str method of the character array returns a vanilla string object of its contents.

(What I am describing here is exactly the behavior of Java StringBuffer.)

-- Talin

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