http://simonwillison.net/2010-01-28T13:28:07+00:00Simon Willison2010-01-28T13:28:07+00:002010-01-28T13:28:07+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2010/Jan/28/python3/#atom-tag

<p><strong><a href="http://www.dabeaz.com/blog/2010/01/reexamining-python-3-text-io.html">Reexamining Python 3 Text I/O</a></strong></p> Python 3.1’s IO performance is a huge improvement over 3.0, but still considerably slower than 2.6. It turns out it’s all to do with Python 3’s unicode support: When you read a file in to a string, you’re asking Python to decode the bytes in to UTF-8 (the new default encoding) at the same time. If you open the file in binary mode Python 3 will read raw bytes in to a bytestring instead, avoiding the conversion overhead and performing only 4% slower than the equivalent code in Python 2.6.4. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/david-beazley">david-beazley</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/io">io</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/performance">performance</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/python">python</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/python3">python3</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/text">text</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/unicode">unicode</a></p>