Joining strings versus augmented assignment

[Erik Max Francis]

Andy Todd wrote:

> In his Linux Journal piece on Quixote ... Greg Ward mentions
> that when joining a series of strings together it is more efficient to
> use "".join(listOfStrings) rather than += (augmented assignment).
> 
> I couldn't find any obvious references to this in the documentation or
> in this group.
> 
> Would anyone care to explain why this is so to a poor ignoramous?

As other people have pointed out, it's because augmented assignment
needs to repeatedly create and destroy objects, whereas S.join can do
the concatenation all at the C level and needs to only create one
object.

The same precept generally applies to other constructs, such as using
string formatting (S % T) rather than building the string bit by bit.

	"%d of %s" % (kiom, kio)

is certain to be faster than

	str(kiom) + " of " + kio

even though they both do the same thing.

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