better way than: myPage += 'more html' , ...

[Adrien Di Mascio]

> Your usage of "should" is Interesting :-).  I wonder what it really means;
> either that you did not time it, or that you timed it and found it not to be
> the fastest.  I'm a big fan of the `.append'-based method, but would switch
> to `cStringIO' if it was significantly faster[1].  I guess that both methods
> are roughly O(N), but would suspect the `cStringIO' might have a higher
> start factor, making it less appealing for only a few short strings.  Did
> someone actually timed both methods compared, and got an opinion?
> 

I've a made a quite basic test on these methods :

    def write_thousands_chars(self, char):
        """Writes a 100000 times 'char'
        """
        res = ""
        for index in range(100000):
            res += char
        return res


    def write_thousands_cstringio(self, char):
        """Writes a 100000 times 'char' in a cStringIO
        """
        from cStringIO import StringIO
        res = StringIO()
        for index in range(100000):
            res.write(char)

        return res


    def write_thousands_stringio(self, char):
        """Writes a 100000 times 'char' in a cStringIO
        """
        from StringIO import StringIO
        res = StringIO()
        for index in range(100000):
            res.write(char)

        return res


    def write_thousands_join(self, char):
        """Writes a 100000 times 'char' in a list and joins it
        """
        str_list = []
        for index in range(100000):
            str_list.append(char)

        return ''.join(str_list)

    

Here's the result :

***************  Results  ***************
In <__main__.MyClass instance at 0x8122e54> :
         write_thousands_cstringio (called 1 times):
                 - Called at Thu Jun 26 15:30:36 2003, exec_time =
		 0.177428007126 sec

         write_thousands_chars (called 1 times):
                 - Called at Thu Jun 26 15:30:05 2003, exec_time =
		 29.1778309345 sec

         write_thousands_join (called 1 times):
                 - Called at Thu Jun 26 15:30:36 2003, exec_time =
		 0.16690993309 sec

         write_thousands_stringio (called 1 times):
                 - Called at Thu Jun 26 15:30:35 2003, exec_time =
		 0.979285955429 sec

*****************************************

cStringIO and join give silimar results, but on smaller strings,
the "join()" way seems better.


-- 
Adrien Di Mascio
LOGILAB, Paris (France).
http://www.logilab.com   http://www.logilab.fr   http://www.logilab.org