Which is the preferred way to concatenate a string

Question

Since Python's string can't be changed, I was wondering how to concatenate a string more efficiently?

I can write like it:

s += stringfromelsewhere

or like this:

s = []
s.append(somestring)

later

s = ''.join(s)

While writing this question, I found a good article talking about the topic.

http://www.skymind.com/~ocrow/python_string/

But it's in Python 2.x., so the question would be did something change in Python 3?

Answer 1

In Python >= 3.6, the new f-string is an efficient way to concatenate a string.

>>> name = 'some_name'
>>> number = 123
>>>
>>> f'Name is {name} and the number is {number}.'
'Name is some_name and the number is 123.'

Answer 2

While somewhat dated, Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python recommends join() over + in this section. As does PythonSpeedPerformanceTips in its section on string concatenation, with the following disclaimer:

The accuracy of this section is disputed with respect to later versions of Python. In CPython 2.5, string concatenation is fairly fast, although this may not apply likewise to other Python implementations. See ConcatenationTestCode for a discussion.

Answer 3

Using in place string concatenation by '+' is THE WORST method of concatenation in terms of stability and cross implementation as it does not support all values. PEP8 standard discourages this and encourages the use of format(), join() and append() for long term use.

Answer 4

You write this function

def str_join(*args):
    return ''.join(map(str, args))

Then you can call simply wherever you want

str_join('Pine')  # Returns : Pine
str_join('Pine', 'apple')  # Returns : Pineapple
str_join('Pine', 'apple', 3)  # Returns : Pineapple3

Answer 5

If the strings you are concatenating are literals, use String literal concatenation

re.compile(
        "[A-Za-z_]"       # letter or underscore
        "[A-Za-z0-9_]*"   # letter, digit or underscore
    )

This is useful if you want to comment on part of a string (as above) or if you want to use raw strings or triple quotes for part of a literal but not all.

Since this happens at the syntax layer it uses zero concatenation operators.

Answer 6

As @jdi mentions Python documentation suggests to use str.join or io.StringIO for string concatenation. And says that a developer should expect quadratic time from += in a loop, even though there's an optimisation since Python 2.4. As this answer says:

If Python detects that the left argument has no other references, it calls realloc to attempt to avoid a copy by resizing the string in place. This is not something you should ever rely on, because it's an implementation detail and because if realloc ends up needing to move the string frequently, performance degrades to O(n^2) anyway.

I will show an example of real-world code that naively relied on += this optimisation, but it didn't apply. The code below converts an iterable of short strings into bigger chunks to be used in a bulk API.

def test_concat_chunk(seq, split_by):
    result = ['']
    for item in seq:
        if len(result[-1]) + len(item) > split_by: 
            result.append('')
        result[-1] += item
    return result

This code can literary run for hours because of quadratic time complexity. Below are alternatives with suggested data structures:

import io

def test_stringio_chunk(seq, split_by):
    def chunk():
        buf = io.StringIO()
        size = 0
        for item in seq:
            if size + len(item) <= split_by:
                size += buf.write(item)
            else:
                yield buf.getvalue()
                buf = io.StringIO()
                size = buf.write(item)
        if size:
            yield buf.getvalue()

    return list(chunk())

def test_join_chunk(seq, split_by):
    def chunk():
        buf = []
        size = 0
        for item in seq:
            if size + len(item) <= split_by:
                buf.append(item)
                size += len(item)
            else:
                yield ''.join(buf)                
                buf.clear()
                buf.append(item)
                size = len(item)
        if size:
            yield ''.join(buf)

    return list(chunk())

And a micro-benchmark:

import timeit
import random
import string
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

line = ''.join(random.choices(
    string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits, k=512)) + '\n'
x = []
y_concat = []
y_stringio = []
y_join = []
n = 5
for i in range(1, 11):
    x.append(i)
    seq = [line] * (20 * 2 ** 20 // len(line))
    chunk_size = i * 2 ** 20
    y_concat.append(
        timeit.timeit(lambda: test_concat_chunk(seq, chunk_size), number=n) / n)
    y_stringio.append(
        timeit.timeit(lambda: test_stringio_chunk(seq, chunk_size), number=n) / n)
    y_join.append(
        timeit.timeit(lambda: test_join_chunk(seq, chunk_size), number=n) / n)
plt.plot(x, y_concat)
plt.plot(x, y_stringio)
plt.plot(x, y_join)
plt.legend(['concat', 'stringio', 'join'], loc='upper left')
plt.show()