Check if dictionary empty with == {}

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 20 Aug 2015 11:54 pm, Skip Montanaro wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 10:16 PM, Steven D'Aprano <
> steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> 
>> So maybe it's a micro-optimization?
> 
> 
> Note, however, that the original post compared "mydict == {}" with "not
> mydict". In that case, it's decidedly not an optimization:
> 
> firefly% python2.7 -m timeit -s "mydict = {1:2}" "if mydict == {}: pass"
> 10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.0508 usec per loop
> firefly% python2.7 -m timeit -s "mydict = {1:2}" "if not mydict: pass"
> 10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.0246 usec per loop

I suppose it depends on whether you want to run the "if" block when mydict
is None, 0, [], "", etc.

Testing for "any Falsey value" and "an empty dict" are not the same,
naturally they will perform differently.




-- 
Steven