that works superbly! any idea about how to multi process the task and concatenate results from each process back into a list?
On 2 August 2017 at 18:05, MRAB <pyt...@mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote: > On 2017-08-02 16:05, Daiyue Weng wrote: > >> Hi, I am trying to removing extra quotes from a large set of strings (a >> list of strings), so for each original string, it looks like, >> >> """str_value1"",""str_value2"",""str_value3"",1,""str_value4""" >> >> >> I like to remove the start and end quotes and extra pairs of quotes on >> each >> string value, so the result will look like, >> >> "str_value1","str_value2","str_value3",1,"str_value4" >> >> >> and then join each string by a new line. >> >> I have tried the following code, >> >> for line in str_lines[1:]: >> strip_start_end_quotes = line[1:-1] >> splited_line_rem_quotes = >> strip_start_end_quotes.replace('\"\"', '"') >> str_lines[str_lines.index(line)] = splited_line_rem_quotes >> >> for_pandas_new_headers_str = '\n'.join(splited_lines) >> >> but it is really slow (running for ages) if the list contains over 1 >> million string lines. I am thinking about a fast way to do that. >> >> [snip] > > The problem is the line: > > str_lines[str_lines.index(line)] > > It does a linear search through str_lines until time finds a match for the > line. > > To find the 10th line it must search through the first 10 lines. > > To find the 100th line it must search through the first 100 lines. > > To find the 1000th line it must search through the first 1000 lines. > > And so on. > > In Big-O notation, the performance is O(n**2). > > The Pythonic way of doing it is to put the results into a new list: > > > new_str_lines = str_lines[:1] > > for line in str_lines[1:]: > strip_start_end_quotes = line[1:-1] > splited_line_rem_quotes = strip_start_end_quotes.replace('\"\"', '"') > new_str_lines.append(splited_line_rem_quotes) > > > In Big-O notation, the performance is O(n). > -- > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list