Frankenstring

[Thomas Lotze]

Peter Otten wrote:

> Not clumsy, just slow.

As you wish ;o) I didn't mean clumsy as in "clumsy looking Python code"
anyway, rather as in "clumsy to use the Python machinery for operations
that are straight-forward and efficient in C, in which language str and
cStringIO are implemented already".

> I hope you'll let us know how much faster your
> final approach turns out to be.

I'm pretty convinced that implementing an algorithmically nice state
machine that goes through a string char by char won't get any faster than
using s[index] all the time unless I do a frankenstring in C. Failing
that, a more pragmatic approach is what Andreas suggests; see the other
subthread.

> By the way, I'll consider anything that
> doesn't implement seek() and tell() cheating :-)

An implementation of frankenstring would have to have seek and tell,
that's the point of doing it. But for half-way simple state machines,
hiding the index handling in a Python class that slows things down it just
not worth it. Doing index += 1 here and there is fine if it happens only
half a dozen times. I know it's not beautiful, that's why I started this
thread ;o)

-- 
Thomas