Is there a reason to prefer one over the other? Is one faster? I compiled my regular expression to make it quicker.
The only way to know which is faster is to time them both. The timeit module makes it pretty easy to do this.
Here is a simple example of using timeit for a different problem; you can adapt it to your own needs:
d = dict( ((i,i,i), i) for i in range(1000))
def withItems(d): for k,v in d.iteritems(): pass
def withKeys(d): for k in d: d[k]
from timeit import Timer
for fn in [withItems, withKeys]: name = fn.__name__ timer = Timer('%s(d)' % name, 'from __main__ import d, %s' % name) print name, timer.timeit(1000)
Kent
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