[Tutor] Quick question regarding Parsing a Delimited string

[Kent Johnson]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 1:22 PM, Rich Lovely<roadierich at googlemail.com> wrote:

> If you really want to speed up the search, you could turn the list of lists
> into a dict, using the first value in each sublist as a key:
>
> dct = dict((i[0], i[1:]) for i in lst)
>
> Then you can access it using the normal dictionary interface.
> dct["3991404"][3]

I'm suspicious of this claim if there is only one lookup needed. You
iterate the whole list and incur the overhead of constructing a dict.
If there will be multiple lookups it may well be a win but as always
there is no substitute for measurement if you want to know what is
faster.

Kent