Comparing strings from the back?
Terry Reedy
tjreedy at udel.edu
Tue Sep 4 01:13:18 EDT 2012
On 9/3/2012 9:54 PM, Roy Smith wrote:
> There's been a bunch of threads lately about string implementations, and
> that got me thinking (which is often a dangerous thing).
>
> Let's assume you're testing two strings for equality. You've already
> done the obvious quick tests (i.e they're the same length), and you're
> down to the O(n) part of comparing every character.
>
> I'm wondering if it might be faster to start at the ends of the strings
> instead of at the beginning?
I posted the 3.3 str (in)equality compare a few days ago. It first
compares length and then kind, then the actual bytes in whatever chunks.
If the latter uses the C/system mem compare, that is faster than
anything coded in Python or even C.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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