On 2019年3月22日 12:51:49 +0100 Stefan Behnel <[email protected]> wrote: > Antoine Pitrou schrieb am 22.03.19 um 11:39: > > On 2019年3月22日 20:31:33 +1300 Greg Ewing wrote: > >> A poster on comp.lang.python is asking about array.array('u'). > >> He wants an efficient mutable collection of unicode characters > >> that can be initialised from a string. > > > > TBH, I think anyone trying to use array.array should be directed to > > Numpy these days. The only reason for array.array being here is that > > it predates Numpy. Otherwise we'd never have added it. > > Well, maybe it wouldn't get *added* these days anymore, with pip+PyPI > nicely in place. But being there already, it makes for a nice and efficient > "batteries included" list replacement for simple data that would otherwise > waste a lot of object memory.
It's not really "batteries included". array.array() supports almost no useful operation. It's a bare-bones container for which you have to implement every useful feature by yourself. (yes, you can use generic mutable sequence algorithms such as heapq or random.shuffle; how often do you need to heapify or shuffle an array of unicode codepoints?) Also, when using a unicode array, there's no substantial win of memory compared to a single str object. You may be losing some actually, because of the flexible str representation. Regards Antoine. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com