Question

Regardless of ease of use, which is more computationally efficient? Constantly slicing lists and appending to them? Or taking substrings and doing the same?

As an example, let’s say I have two binary strings “11011” and “01001”. If I represent these as lists, I’ll be choosing a random “slice” point. Let’s say I get 3. I’ll Take the first 3 characters of the first string and the remaining characters of the second string (so I’d have to slice both) and create a new string out of it.

Would this be more efficiently done by cutting the substrings or by representing it as a list ( [1, 1, 0, 1, 1] ) rather than a string?

Answer 1

>>> a = "11011"
>>> b = "01001"
>>> import timeit
>>> def strslice():
    return a[:3] + b[3:]

>>> def lstslice():
    return list(a)[:3] + list(b)[3:]
>>> c = list(a)
>>> d = list(b)
>>> def lsts():
    return c[:3] + d[3:]

>>> timeit.timeit(strslice)
0.5103488475836432
>>> timeit.timeit(lstslice)
2.4350100538824613
>>> timeit.timeit(lsts)
1.0648406858527295