By chance and luckily, first attempt. IDLE, Windows 7.0 Pro 32, Pentium Dual Core 2.6, RAM 2 Go
Py 3.2.3 >>> timeit.repeat("('€'*100+'€'*100).replace('€', 'œ')") [1.6939567134893707, 1.672874290786993, 1.6761219212298073] Py 3.3.0b2 >>> timeit.repeat("('€'*100+'€'*100).replace('€', 'œ')") [7.924470733910917, 7.8554985620787345, 7.878623849091914] Console c:\python32\python -m timeit "('€'*100+'€'*100).replace('€' , 'œ')" 1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.48 usec per loop c:\python33\python -m timeit "('€'*100+'€'*100).replace('€' , 'œ')" 100000 loops, best of 3: 7.62 usec per loop Note The used characters are not members of the latin-1 coding scheme (btw an *unusable* coding). They are however charaters in cp1252 and mac-roman. jmf -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list