Python: speed for "in" vs regular expression [duplicate]

Question

When determining whether an instance of substring exists in a larger string,

I am considering two options:

(1)

if "aaaa" in "bbbaaaaaabbb":
    dosomething()

(2)

pattern = re.compile("aaaa")
if pattern.search("bbbaaaaaabbb"):
    dosomething()

Which of the two are more efficient & faster (considering the size of the string is huge)??

Is there any other option that is faster??

Thanks

Answer 1

Regex will be slower.

$ python -m timeit '"aaaa" in "bbbaaaaaabbb"'
10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.0767 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s 'import re; pattern = re.compile("aaaa")' 'pattern.search("bbbaaaaaabbb")'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.356 usec per loop

Answer 2

Option (1) definitely is faster. For the future, do something like this to test it:

>>> import time, re
>>> if True:
...     s = time.time()
...     "aaaa" in "bbbaaaaaabbb"
...     print time.time()-s
... 
True
1.78813934326e-05

>>> if True:
...     s = time.time()
...     pattern = re.compile("aaaa")
...     pattern.search("bbbaaaaaabbb")
...     print time.time()-s
... 
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xb74a91e0>
0.0143280029297

gnibbler's way of doing this is better, I never really played around with interpreter options so I didn't know about that one.