[Python-Dev] Mailbox module - timings and functionality changes
Guido van Rossum
guido at python.org
Tue Jun 29 21:26:31 CEST 2010
It should probably be opened in binary mode. Binary files do have a
.readline() method (returning a bytes object), and bytes objects have
a .startswith() method. The tell positions computed this way are even
compatible with those used by the text file. So you could do it this
way:
- open binary stream
- compute TOC by reading through it using .readline() and .tell()
- rewind (don't close)
- wrap the binary stream in a text stream
- use that for the rest of the code
--Guido
On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
> A.M. Kuchling wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 11:40:50AM -0400, Steve Holden wrote:
>>> I will leave the profiler output to speak for itself, since I can find
>>> nothing much to say about it except that there's a hell of a lot of
>>> decoding going on inside mailbox.iterkeys().
>>
>> The problem is actually in _generate_toc(), which is reading through
>> the entire file to figure out where all the 'From' lines that start
>> messages are located. TextIOWrapper()'s tell() method seems to be
>> very slow, so one help is to only call tell() when necessary; patch:
>>
>> -> svn diff Lib/
>> Index: Lib/mailbox.py
>> ===================================================================
>> --- Lib/mailbox.py (revision 82346)
>> +++ Lib/mailbox.py (working copy)
>> @@ -775,13 +775,14 @@
>> starts, stops = [], []
>> self._file.seek(0)
>> while True:
>> - line_pos = self._file.tell()
>> line = self._file.readline()
>> if line.startswith('From '):
>> + line_pos = self._file.tell()
>> if len(stops) < len(starts):
>> stops.append(line_pos - len(os.linesep))
>> starts.append(line_pos)
>> elif not line:
>> + line_pos = self._file.tell()
>> stops.append(line_pos)
>> break
>> self._toc = dict(enumerate(zip(starts, stops)))
>>
>> But should mailboxes really be opened in a UTF-8 encoding, or should
>> they be treated as 7-bit text? I'll have to think about this.
>
> Neither! You can't open them as 7-bit text, because real-world email
> does contain bytes whose ordinal value exceeds 127. You can't open them
> using a text encoding because theoretically there might be ASCII headers
> that indicate that parts of the content are in specific character sets
> or encodings.
>
> If only we had a data structure that easily allowed us to manipulate
> 8-bit characters ...
>
> regards
> Steve
> --
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--
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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