Python: a Technique to Append String in a Loop

Xah Lee, 2012-03-14

Google's Python style guide has this interesting advice:

Avoid using the + and += operators to accumulate a string within a loop. Since strings are immutable, this creates unnecessary temporary objects and results in quadratic rather than linear running time. Instead, add each substring to a list and ''.join the list after the loop terminates (or, write each substring to a cStringIO.StringIO buffer).

They gave 2 examples, one using string append and the other using list append. Here's their examples, slightly modified to be runnable code:

# python
# append string in a loop

employee_list = [["Mary", "Jane"], ["Jenny", "Doe"], ["Alice", "Johnson"]]

employee_table = '<table>'
for last_name, first_name in employee_list:
    employee_table += '<tr><td>%s, %s</td></tr>' % (last_name, first_name)
employee_table += '</table>'

print employee_table

# python
# append string in a loop, but using list instead

employee_list = [["Mary", "Jane"], ["Jenny", "Doe"], ["Alice", "Johnson"]]

items = ['<table>']
for last_name, first_name in employee_list:
    items.append('<tr><td>%s, %s</td></tr>' % (last_name, first_name))
items.append('</table>')
employee_table = ''.join(items)

print employee_table

This is interesting in 2 aspects:

• ① It is a nice python trick to know. It makes your code a order of magnitude faster. (when your list has large number of items)
• ② It shows that the python language and compiler combination is not smart enough. Clearly, using list to append string as a intermediate step to increase speed, is a hack. The direct string append is clear and is what programer want.

2012-03-16 For a speed test, see:

• Python Strings Accumulation Techniques 2012-03-14 By Magnun. @ Source www.mindbending.org

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