python string, best way to concat

[Roy Smith]

In article <63bdccb4-9e34-4e40-b07d-14342e21815f at googlegroups.com>,
 peter <peter.mosley at talk21.com> wrote:

> I used to struggle with the concept of ''.join(('hello ','world')) - it 
> seemed so convoluted compared with the intuitive 'hello '+'world', and I 
> could never remember the syntax.  Also, for the strings I was generally using 
> the performance penalty was infinitesimal, so I was just adding complexity 
> for the sake of the abstract concept of a more 'pythonic' style.
> 
> Obviously this isn't going to change, but for concatenating short strings a 
> and b is there any practical reason to avoid a+b?

For places where performance doesn't matter, string addition is just 
fine.  The computer works for you.  If you're working for the computer, 
you're doing something wrong.

That being said, join is typically used where you have a variable number 
of strings in some iterable (e.g. a list of strings).  For exactly two 
strings, I would have probably written this as:

'%s %s' % (string1, string2)

and if I really wanted to use the join syntax, I would have moved the 
delimiter (in this case, a space), into the first string:

' '.join([string1, string2])

Be aware of the various ways, then pick the one that works for you.