python - Does string slicing perform copy in memory?

Question

(This question already has answers here): question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64871329/does-string-slicing-perform-copy-in-memory

Answer 1

String slicing makes a copy in CPython.

Looking in the source, this operation is handled in unicodeobject.c:unicode_subscript. There is evidently a special-case to re-use memory when the step is 1, start is 0, and the entire content of the string is sliced - this goes into unicode_result_unchanged and there will not be a copy. However, the general case calls PyUnicode_Substring where all roads lead to a memcpy.

To empirically verify these claims, you can use a stdlib memory profiling tool tracemalloc:

# s.py
import tracemalloc

tracemalloc.start()
before = tracemalloc.take_snapshot()
a = "." * 7 * 1024**2  # 7 MB of .....   # line 6, first alloc
b = a[1:]                                # line 7, second alloc
after = tracemalloc.take_snapshot()

for stat in after.compare_to(before, 'lineno')[:2]:
    print(stat)

You should see the top two statistics output like this:

/tmp/s.py:6: size=7168 KiB (+7168 KiB), count=1 (+1), average=7168 KiB
/tmp/s.py:7: size=7168 KiB (+7168 KiB), count=1 (+1), average=7168 KiB

This result shows two allocations of 7 meg, strong evidence of the memory copying, and the exact line numbers of those allocations will be indicated.

Try changing the slice from b = a[1:] into b = a[0:] to see that entire-string-special-case in effect: there should be only one large allocation now, and sys.getrefcount(a) will increase by one.

In theory, since strings are immutable, an implementation could re-use memory for substring slices. This would likely complicate any reference-counting based garbage collection process, so it may not be a useful idea in practice. Consider the case where a small slice from a much larger string was taken - unless you implemented some kind of sub-reference counting on the slice, the memory from the much larger string could not be freed until the end of the substring's lifetime.

For users that specifically need a standard type which can be sliced without copying the underlying data, there is memoryview. See What exactly is the point of memoryview in Python for more information about that.