jonathan.slend...@gmail.com wrote: >> Can you expand a bit on how array("u") helps here? Are the matches in the >> gigabyte range? > > I have a string of unicode characters, e.g.: > > data = array.array('u', u'x' * 1000000000) > > Then I need to change some data in the middle of this string, for > instance: > > data[500000] = 'y' > > Then I want to use re to search in this text: > > re.search('y', data) > > This has to be fast. I really don't want to split and concatenate strings. > Re should be able to process it and the expressions can be much more > complex than this. (I think it should be anything that implements the > buffer protocol). > > So, this works perfectly fine and fast. But it scares me that it's > deprecated and Python 4 will not support it anymore.
Hm, this doesn't even work with Python 3: >>> data = array.array("u", u"x"*1000) >>> data[100] = "y" >>> re.search("y", data) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python3.4/re.py", line 166, in search return _compile(pattern, flags).search(string) TypeError: can't use a string pattern on a bytes-like object You can search for bytes >>> re.search(b"y", data) <_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(400, 401), match=b'y'> >>> data[101] = "z" >>> re.search(b"y", data) <_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(400, 401), match=b'y'> >>> re.search(b"yz", data) >>> re.search(b"y\0\0\0z", data) <_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(400, 405), match=b'y\x00\x00\x00z'> but if that is good enough you can use a bytearray in the first place. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list