3.2 and 2.7 results on my desktop using Chris examples (Hope I cut-pasted them correctly) ----------------------------- Welcome to the Emacs shell
~ $ python3 Python 3.2.3 (default, Feb 20 2013, 17:02:41) [GCC 4.7.2] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> from timeit import timeit >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\u0034'","s='asdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.2893378734588623 >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\u1234'","s='asdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.2842249870300293 >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\u1234'","s='\u1234sdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.28406381607055664 >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\U00012345'","s='asdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.28420209884643555 >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\U00012345'","s='\u1234sdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.2853250503540039 >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\U00012345'","s='\U00012345sdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.283905029296875 >>> ~ $ python Python 2.7.3 (default, Jan 2 2013, 16:53:07) [GCC 4.7.2] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> from timeit import timeit >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\u0034'","s='asdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.20418286323547363 >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\u1234'","s='asdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.20579099655151367 >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\u1234'","s='\u1234sdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.5055279731750488 >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\U00012345'","s='asdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.28449511528015137 >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\U00012345'","s='\u1234sdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.6001529693603516 >>> timeit("s=s[:-1]+'\U00012345'","s='\U00012345sdf'*10000",number=10000) 0.8430721759796143 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list