Unicode charmap decoders slow

[Tony Nelson]

Is there a faster way to decode from charmaps to utf-8 than unicode()?

I'm writing a small card-file program.  As a test, I use a 53 MB MBox 
file, in mac-roman encoding.  My program reads and parses the file into 
messages in about 3..5 seconds, but takes about 13.5 seconds to iterate 
over the cards and convert them to utf-8:

    for i in xrange(len(cards)):
        u = unicode(cards[i], encoding)
        cards[i] = u.encode('utf-_8')

The time is nearly all in the unicode() call.  It's not so much how much 
time it takes, but that it takes 4 times as long as the real work, just 
to do table lookups.

Looking at the source (which, if I have it right, is 
PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() in unicodeobject.c), I think it is doing a 
dictionary lookup for each character.  I would have thought that it 
would make and cache a LUT the size of the charmap (and hook the 
relevent dictionary stuff to delete the cached LUT if the dictionary is 
changed).

I thought of using U"".translate(), but the unicode version is defined 
to be slow.  Is there some similar approach?  I'm almost (but not quite) 
ready to try it in Pyrex.

I'm new to Python.  I didn't google anything relevent on python.org or 
in groups.
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