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[Python-Dev] Internal representation of strings and Micropython

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Thu Jun 5 02:03:17 CEST 2014 
Serhiy Storchaka wrote:
> html.HTMLParser, json.JSONDecoder, re.compile, tokenize.tokenize don't 
> use iterators. They use indices, str.find and/or regular expressions. 
> Common use case is quickly find substring starting from current position 
> using str.find or re.search, process found token, advance position and 
> repeat.

For that kind of thing, you don't need an actual character
index, just some way of referring to a place in a string.

Instead of an integer, str.find() etc. could return a
StringPosition, which would be an opaque reference to a
particular point in a particular string. You would be
able to pass StringPositions to indexing and slicing
operations to get fast indexing into the string that
they were derived from.

StringPositions could support the following operations:

    StringPosition + int --> StringPosition
    StringPosition - int --> StringPosition
    StringPosition - StringPosition --> int

These would be computed by counting characters forwards
or backwards in the string, which would be slower than
int arithmetic but still faster than counting from the
beginning of the string every time.

In other contexts, StringPositions would coerce to ints
(maybe being an int subclass?) allowing them to be used
in any existing algorithm that slices strings using ints.

-- 
Greg
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