Given a very large string. I would like to process parts of the string in a loop like this:
large_string = "foobar..."
while large_string:
process(large_string.pop(200))
What is a nice and efficient way of doing this?
4 Answers
You can wrap the string in a StringIO or BytesIO and pretend it's a file. That should be pretty fast.
from cStringIO import StringIO
# or, in Py3/Py2.6+:
#from io import BytesIO, StringIO
s = StringIO(large_string)
while True:
chunk = s.read(200)
if len(chunk) > 0:
process(chunk)
if len(chunk) < 200:
break
you can convert the string to a list. list(string) and pop it, or you could iterate in chunks slicing the list [] or you can slice the string as is and iterate in chunks
You can do this with slicing:
large_string = "foobar..."
while large_string:
process(large_string[-200:])
large_string = large_string[:-200]
To follow up on dm03514's answer, you can do something like this:
output = ""
ex = "hello"
exList = list(ex)
exList.pop(2)
for letter in exList:
output += letter
print output # Prints 'helo'
