[Python-Dev] efficient string concatenation (yep, from 2004) (original) (raw)

Lennart Regebro regebro at gmail.com
Wed Feb 13 08:42:17 CET 2013

Something is needed - a patch for PyPy or for the documentation I guess.

Not arguing that it wouldn't be good, but I disagree that it is needed.

This is only an issue when you, as in your proof, have a loop that does concatenation. This is usually when looping over a list of strings that should be concatenated together. Doing so in a loop with concatenation may be the natural way for people new to Python, but the "natural" way to do it in Python is with a ''.join() call.

This:

s = ''.join(('X' for x in xrange(x)))

Is more than twice as fast in Python 2.7 than your example. It is in fact also slower in PyPy 1.9 than Python 2.7, but only with a factor of two:

Python 2.7: time for 10000000 concats = 0.887 Pypy 1.9: time for 10000000 concats = 1.600

(And of course s = 'X'* x takes only a bout a hundredth of the time, but that's cheating. ;-)

//Lennart

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