How Can I Emulate a Mutable String in Python (Like Stringbuffer in Java or Stringbuilder in C#)?

Python 3

From the docs:

Concatenating immutable sequences always results in a new object. This means that building up a sequence by repeated concatenation will have a quadratic runtime cost in the total sequence length. To get a linear runtime cost, you must switch to one of the alternatives below: if concatenating str objects, you can build a list and use str.join() at the end or else write to an io.StringIO instance and retrieve its value when complete

Experiment to compare runtime of several options:

import sys
import timeit
from io import StringIO
from array import array


def test_concat():
    out_str = ''
    for _ in range(loop_count):
        out_str += 'abc'
    return out_str


def test_join_list_loop():
    str_list = []
    for _ in range(loop_count):
        str_list.append('abc')
    return ''.join(str_list)


def test_array():
    char_array = array('b')
    for _ in range(loop_count):
        char_array.frombytes(b'abc')
    return str(char_array.tostring())


def test_string_io():
    file_str = StringIO()
    for _ in range(loop_count):
        file_str.write('abc')
    return file_str.getvalue()


def test_join_list_compr():
    return ''.join(['abc' for _ in range(loop_count)])


def test_join_gen_compr():
    return ''.join('abc' for _ in range(loop_count))


loop_count = 80000

print(sys.version)

res = {}

for k, v in dict(globals()).items():
    if k.startswith('test_'):
        res[k] = timeit.timeit(v, number=10)

for k, v in sorted(res.items(), key=lambda x: x[1]):
    print('{:.5f} {}'.format(v, k))

results

3.7.5 (default, Nov  1 2019, 02:16:32) 
[Clang 11.0.0 (clang-1100.0.33.8)]
0.03738 test_join_list_compr
0.05681 test_join_gen_compr
0.09425 test_string_io
0.09636 test_join_list_loop
0.11976 test_concat
0.19267 test_array