[Python-Dev] Cost-Free Slice into FromString constructors--Long (original) (raw)

Jean-Paul Calderone exarkun at divmod.com
Thu May 25 17:28:07 CEST 2006

On Thu, 25 May 2006 15:01:36 +0000, Runar Petursson <runar at runar.net> wrote:

We've been talking this week about ideas for speeding up the parsing of Longs coming out of files or network. The use case is having a large string with embeded Long's and parsing them to real longs. One approach would be to use a simple slice: long(mystring[x:y])

an expensive operation in a tight loop. The proposed solution is to add further keyword arguments to Long (such as): long(mystring, base=10, start=x, end=y) The start/end would allow for negative indexes, as slices do, but otherwise simply limit the scope of the parsing. There are other solutions, using buffer-like objects and such, but this seems like a simple win for anyone parsing a lot of text. I implemented it in a branch runar-longslice- branch, but it would need to be updated with Tim's latest improvements to long. Then you may ask, why not do it for everything else parsing from string--to which I say it should. Thoughts?

This really seems like a poor option. Why fix the problem with a hundred special cases instead of a single general solution?

Hmm, one reason could be that the general solution doesn't work:

exarkun at kunai:~$ python Python 2.4.3 (#2, Apr 27 2006, 14:43:58) [GCC 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

long(buffer('1234', 0, 3)) Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? ValueError: null byte in argument for long() long(buffer('123a', 0, 3)) Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? ValueError: invalid literal for long(): 123a

Still, fixing that seems like a better idea. ;)

Jean-Paul

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