I did the test the way you suggested. It took not so long to realize stupid mistakes I made. Thank you.
The following is the result of test with timeit(number=10000) using fresh copy of the list for every iteration 0.331462860107 0.19401717186 0.186257839203 0.0762069225311 I tried my recursive-function to fix up my big-messed-list. It stops immediately because of 'RuntimeError: maximum recursion limit exceeded' I hope this trial-and-errors getting me good place... anyway, thank you. On 10/13/06, Peter Otten <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > js wrote: > > > By eliminating list cloning, my function got much faster than before. > > I really appreciate you, John. > > > > def prefixdel_recursively2(alist): > > if len(alist) < 2: > > return alist > > > > first = alist.pop(0) > > unneeded = [no for no, line in enumerate(alist) if > > line.startswith(first)] adjust=0 > > for i in unneeded: > > del alist[i+adjust] > > adjust -= 1 > > > > return [first] + prefixdel_recursively(alist) > > > > > > process stime > > prefixdel_stupidly : 11.9247150421 > > prefixdel_recursively : 14.6975700855 > > prefixdel_recursively2 : 0.408113956451 > > prefixdel_by_john : 7.60227012634 > > Those are suspicious results. Time it again with number=1, or a fresh copy > of the data for every iteration. > > I also have my doubts whether sorting by length is a good idea. To take it > to the extreme: what if your data file contains an empty line? > > Peter > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
