What can you do if your text manipulation in Python is slowing you down? Are there faster alternatives using a compiled extension? This week on the show, Christopher Trudeau is here, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

Christopher shares a recent article by Itamar Turner-Trauring called “Speeding Up Text Processing in Python (Is Hard).” The piece compares the performance of string-matching scenarios using several alternatives to pure Python that rely on compiled extensions.

We also discuss a recent Real Python tutorial by Stephen Gruppetta on when to use .__repr__() vs .__str__() in Python. We cover the use cases for these special methods and the intended audiences for the strings they produce.

We share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a news update, an article on the functional power of Python’s reduce(), a call to ban 1+N in Django, a friendly project to fetch your data files, and a tool for tracking your work from the shell.

Course Spotlight: Unicode in Python: Working With Character Encodings

In this course, you’ll get a Python-centric introduction to character encodings and Unicode. Handling character encodings and numbering systems can at times seem painful and complicated, but this guide is here to help with easy-to-follow Python examples.

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