Question

I’m having a hard time with the setup statement in Python’s timeit.Timer(stmt, setup_stmt). I appreciate any help to get me out of this tricky problem:

So my sniplet looks like this:

def compare(string1, string2):     # compare 2 strings  if __name__ = '__main__':     str1 = 'This string has \n several new lines \n in the middle'     str2 = 'This string hasn't any new line, but a single quote ('), in the middle'      t = timeit.Timer('compare(p1, p2)', 'from __main__ import compare; p1=%s, p2=%s' % (str1,str2)) 

I don’t know how to escape the metacharacter in the variable str1, str2 without changing their meaning in the setup statement:

'from __main__ import compare; p1=%s, p2=%s' % (str1,str2) 

I tried various combination but always have the following errors: SyntaxError: can’t assign to literal
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning single-quoted string
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Answer 1

Consider This as an alternative.

t = timeit.Timer('compare(p1, p2)', 'from __main__ import compare; p1=%r; p2=%r' % (str1,str2)) 

The %r uses the repr for the string, which Python always quotes and escapes correctly.

EDIT: Fixed code by changing a comma to a semicolon; the error is now gone.