String concatenation in loop causes production risks
Note : the rule is restricted to expression with litteral string. Variable string need semantic to be detected.
bad
employee_table = '<table>' for last_name, first_name in employee_list: employee_table += '<tr><td>%s, %s</td></tr>' % (last_name, first_name) employee_table += '</table>'
good
items = ['<table>'] for last_name, first_name in employee_list: items.append('<tr><td>%s, %s</td></tr>' % (last_name, first_name)) items.append('</table>') employee_table = ''.join(items)
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Why you should care
Avoid using the + and += operators to accumulate a string within a loop. Since strings are immutable, this creates unnecessary temporary objects and results in quadratic rather than linear running time. Instead, add each substring to a list and ”.join the list after the loop terminates (or, write each substring to a io.BytesIO buffer).
Business Impacts
CAST recommendations
References
https://www.quantifiedcode.com/knowledge-base/performance/Use%20%60extend%28%29%60%20for%20list%20concatenation/3kr7yXet
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