best way to replace first word in string?

[Steven D'Aprano]

Everything got faster, so it wasn't just pulling the chr conversion.

Sure -- I'm not concerned about proportional speed increases.

It's a 3Ghz P4.

Perhaps a tad faster, but not too much.

It's still in the buffer, and I copied it from your timings:



I'm runing Python 2.4.1 built with GCC 3.4.2.

There is a difference there:

http://www.python.org/doc/2.4/whatsnew/node12.html

Second-last paragraph:

String concatenations in statements of the form s = s + "abc" and s +=
"abc" are now performed more efficiently in certain circumstances. This
optimization won't be present in other Python implementations such as
Jython, so you shouldn't rely on it; using the join() method of strings is
still recommended when you want to efficiently glue a large number of
strings together. (Contributed by Armin Rigo.)
[end quote]