python - Fastest way to generate delimited string from 1d numpy array

Question

I have a program which needs to turn many large one-dimensional numpy arrays of floats into delimited strings. I am finding this operation quite slow relative to the mathematical operations in my program and am wondering if there is a way to speed it up. For example, consider the following loop, which takes 100,000 random numbers in a numpy array and joins each array into a comma-delimited string.

import numpy as np
x = np.random.randn(100000)
for i in range(100):
    ",".join(map(str, x))

This loop takes about 20 seconds to complete (total, not each cycle). In contrast, consider that 100 cycles of something like elementwise multiplication (x*x) would take than one 1/10 of a second to complete. Clearly the string join operation creates a large performance bottleneck; in my actual application it will dominate total runtime. This makes me wonder, is there a faster way than ",".join(map(str, x))? Since map() is where almost all the processing time occurs, this comes down to the question of whether there a faster to way convert a very large number of numbers to strings.

Answer 1

A little late, but this is faster for me:

#generate an array with strings
x_arrstr = np.char.mod('%f', x)
#combine to a string
x_str = ",".join(x_arrstr)

Speed up is on my machine about 1.5x