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From: Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com>
Subject: Re: how to avoid leading white spaces
Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:18:40 +0100
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On Fri, 03 Jun 2011 02:58:24 +0000, Chris Torek wrote:

> Python might be penalized by its use of Unicode here, since a
> Boyer-Moore table for a full 16-bit Unicode string would need
> 65536 entries (one per possible ord() value).  However, if the
> string being sought is all single-byte values, a 256-element
> table suffices; re.compile(), at least, could scan the pattern
> and choose an appropriate underlying search algorithm.

The table can be truncated or compressed at the cost of having to map
codepoints to table indices. Or use a hash table instead of an array.