For a file hashing system (finding similar files, rather than identical
ones), I need to be able to efficiently and quickly sum the ordinals of
the bytes of a file and their squares. Because of the nature of the
application, it's a requirement that I do it in Python, or only with
standard library modules (if such facilities exist) that might assist.
So far the fastest way I've found is using the `sum` builtin and
generators::
ordinalSum = sum(ord(x) for x in data)
ordinalSumSquared = sum(ord(x)**2 for x in data)
This is about twice as fast as an explicit loop, but since it's going to
be processing massive amounts of data, the faster the better. Are there
any tricks I'm not thinking of, or perhaps helper functions in other
modules that I'm not thinking of?
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Erik Max Francis && [EMAIL PROTECTED] && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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