A trivial question about print

[Brad Bollenbach]

In article <Wbit8.8361$vF6.239936 at news2.tin.it>, Alex Martelli wrote:
> Ante Bagaric wrote:
>> Sure in most cases this feature helps, you dont need zillion " " strings
>> between your variables :), but wouldnt it be nice if there was
>> python-simple way to just get around it?
> 
> There IS -- it's sys.output.write (or more generally the write method
> of any file object).  Does no formatting -- it emits a string, and
> that's all.

Not to mention, sys.stdout.write() is considerably faster than print:

_printspeed.py_

#!/usr/bin/python
for i in range(1000000):
    print "hello, world"

_writespeed.py_

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
faster = sys.stdout.write
for i in range(1000000):
    faster("hello, world\n")
    
$ time ./printspeed.py

[snip 1,000,000 lines of output]

real    1m11.301s
user    0m23.140s
sys     0m6.620s

$ time ./writespeed.py

[snip 1,000,000 lines of output]

real    0m54.578s
user    0m12.250s
sys     0m6.730s

You probably won't care about this unless you working on large amounts
of data, but it's worth keeping in mind.


--
Brad Bollenbach