Originally published: 2011-04-28 13:07:42
Last updated: 2011-08-13 16:47:36
Author: Romain Dartigues
I wrote this after reading The Alphanum Algorithm (http://www.davekoelle.com/alphanum.html) by David Koelle a few years ago; my goal was to improve the performances of the Python version of his scripts.
My version is approximatly 10 times faster than it's alphanum.py and about 3 times faster than the alphanum.py_v2.4 on my computer, yielding the same results (for non-unicode at least).
Note: see the version of wizkid in the comments which is even faster.