Abrahams, Max wrote: > I've looked into pickle, dump, load, save, readlines(), etc. > > Which is the best method? Fastest? My lists tend to be around a thousand to a > million items. > > Binary and text files are both okay, text would be preferred in general > unless there's a significant speed boost from something binary. > > thanks
1) Why don't you time them with the timeit module? http://docs.python.org/lib/module-timeit.html Results will vary with the specific data you have, and your hardware speed, but if it's a lot of data, it's most likely going to be the latter that's the bottleneck. A compact binary format will help alleviate this. If you're reading a lot of data into memory, you might have to deal with your OS swap/virtual memory. 2) "Best" depends on what your data is and what you're doing with it. Are you reinventing a flat-file database? There are better solutions for databases. If you're just reformatting data to pass to another program, say, for scientific computation, the portability may be more of an issue. Number crunching the resultant data may be even more time consuming such that the time spent writing/reading it becomes insignificant. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
