Hello, I am using some very large dictionaries with keys that are long strings (urls). For a large dictionary these keys start to take up a significant amount of memory. I do not need access to these keys -- I only need to be able to retrieve the value associated with a certain key, so I do not want to have the keys stored in memory. Could I just hash() the url strings first and use the resulting integer as the key? I think what I'm after here is more like a tradition hash table. If I do it this way am I going to get the memory savings I am after? Will the hash function always generate unique keys? Also, would the same technique work for a set?
Any other thoughts or considerations are appreciated. Thank You. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
