Question

I’m going to have 1 small dictionary (between 5 and 20 keys) that will be referenced up to a hundred times or so for one page load in python 2.5.

I’m starting to name the keys which it will be looking up and I was wondering if there is a key naming convention I could follow to help dict lookup times.

Answer 1

I had to test 😉

using

• f1, integer key 1
• f2 short string, "one"
• f3 long string "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"

as one of the keys into a dictionary of length 4. Iterating 10,000,000 times and measuring the times. I get this result:

<function f1 at 0xb779187c>
f1 3.64
<function f2 at 0xb7791bfc>
f2 3.48
<function f3 at 0xb7791bc4>
f3 3.65

I.e no difference…

My code