[ACCEPTED]-Does Python do slice-by-reference on strings?-string
Python does slice-by-copy, meaning every time you slice (except for 11 very trivial slices, such as a[:]), it copies all of the data into 10 a new string object.
According to one of the developers, this 9 choice was made because
The [slice-by-reference] approach 8 is more complicated, harder to implement and 7 may lead to unexpected behavior.
For example:
a = "a long string with 500,000 chars ..." b = a[0] del aWith 6 the slice-as-copy design the string
ais 5 immediately freed. The slice-as-reference 4 design would keep the 500kB string in memory 3 although you are only interested in the 2 first character.
Apparently, if you absolutely 1 need a view into a string, you can use a memoryview object.
When you slice strings, they return a new 2 instance of String. Strings are immutable 1 objects.
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