Efficient String Concatenation in Python

/*--- holy mAcar00ns!! --- */

Efficient String Concatenation in Python: "Building long strings in the Python progamming language can sometimes result in very slow running code. In this article I investigate the computational performance of various string concatenation methods.

In Python the string object is immutable - each time a string is assigned to a variable a new object is created in memory to represent the new value. This contrasts with languages like perl and basic, where a string variable can be modified in place. The common operation of constructing a long string out of several short segments is not very efficient in Python if you use the obvious approach of appending new segments to the end of the existing string. Each time you append to the end of a string, the Python interpreter must create a new string object and copy the contents of both the existing string and the appended string into it. As the strings you are manipulating become large this proces becomes increasingly slow.

What other methods are available and how does their performance compare? I decided to test several different approaches to constructing very long strings to see how much they vary in efficiency."

all your bases ar--