Why are strings immutable?
Brent W. Hughes
brent.hughes at comcast.net
Mon Aug 23 15:58:38 EDT 2004
Let me give two examples of where I think it would be nice to be able to
change strings in place:
First example:
I want to add about 20,000 words to the end of a string, something like
this:
Str = [ ]
for i in range(20000):
Word = DoSomeProcessing()
Str += Word
I'd actually like to say Str.extend(Word). As it is, I'm thinking of
something like this:
List = [ ]
for i in range(20000):
Word = DoSomeProcessing()
List.extend(list(Word))
Str = ''.join(List)
Second example:
I would like to reverse a string containing about 120,000 characters. I'd
like to do it in place, but I'm planning to do something like this:
List = list(Str)
List.reverse()
Str = ''.join(List)
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