Multiple prefixes match

I’m not using often string manipulation (I usually handle SQLAlchemy’s queries and sometime XML/XHTML manipulation with the lxml library) but sometimes I need to analyse some paths expressed with a dotted notation comparing every path with a predefined list of path prefixes. The obvious solution is to compare in a for cycle every input path against the predefined prefix list returning at the first positive match.

This solution looked too naive, I was sure a better and faster solution was available in the Python built-ins, and looking at the Python documentation I was right.

Suppose you want to match the string:

foo.user.add

with the prefixes:

foor.user
bar.user

a naive implementation can be:

prefixes = ("foo.user", "bar.user")
path = "foo.user.add"

for prefix in prefixes:
    if path.startswith(prefix):
        return True

return False

Bad solution, verbose and slow because involves a for loop executed by the Python VM.

I’ll never be tired to say RTFM is the way to go, i this case startswith() and related method endswith() doesn’t accept only the prefix to match, but can accept also a tuple of prefixes and returns True if at least one prefix matches.

The code above can be rewritten in a single line:

return path.startswith(prefixes)

Concise, clean, faster because executed as C code instead interpreted by the Python VM.