[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > inefficient. Since these data are coming from an OMR scanner at 9600 bps (or > faster if I can reset it programmatically to 38K over the serial cable), I > want a fast algorithm.
It depends on your actual environment, of course, but 38kbps is usually not considered "fast" today - given a modern CPU (or even one from a few years back), 21 (or 42) short string comparisons in an interprated language should be trivially fast. (I'm not saying that using a different approach such as dictionaries isn't good because of other reasons :) ) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
