Re: Erasing strings from memory?
Paul Swartz <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.python.cryptography |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 12:53:57PM -0500, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
> PS> I don't know. I liked that the old code cleared all the
> PS> references to the string so I don't have to worry about
> PS> misc. references sitting around keeping this string in memory.
> PS> Does python really care if strings change on it?
>
> Yes. Python depends in a lot of ways on strings being immutable. If
> the string gets stuffed in a dictionary and you modify it, you'll get
> unpredictable results. The string can also be interned. You can't
> modify a string in the intern table.
None of these strings will be a dictionary key. They're either
incorporated into a hash, or parsed into an alternate form. As for
interning, will they be interned if they're not a dictionary key nor do
I manually intern them?
> I think the solution is to verify that it is not interned (ob_sstate),
> then recalculate the hash after zapping the string.
This sounds like a good idea. Thanks for all the help/advice.
-p
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