Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes: > Sure, four characters isn't a big deal to step through. But it still > makes indexing and slicing operations O(N) instead of O(1), plus you'd > have to zark the whole string up to where you want to work.
I know some systems chop the strings into blocks of (say) a few hundred chars, so you can immediately get to the correct block, then scan into the block to get to the desired char offset. > I don't have a Python example of parsing a huge string, but I've done > it in other languages, and when I can depend on indexing being a cheap > operation, I'll happily do exactly that. I'd be interested to know what the context was, where you parsed a big unicode string in a way that required random access to the nth character in the string. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
