Which Is the Preferred Way to Concatenate a String in Python

Most Efficient Method to Concatenate Strings in Python

Why don't you try it out? You can use timeit.timeit() to run a statement many times and return the overall duration.

Here, we use s to setup the variables a and b (not included in the overall time), and then run the various options 10 million times.

>>> from timeit import timeit
>>>
>>> n = 10 * 1000 * 1000
>>> s = "a = 'start'; b = ' end'"
>>>
>>> timeit("c = a + b",                 setup=s, number=n)
0.4452877212315798
>>>
>>> timeit("c = f'{a}{b}'",             setup=s, number=n)
0.5252049304544926
>>>
>>> timeit("c = '%s%s'.format(a, b)",   setup=s, number=n)
0.6849184390157461
>>>>
>>> timeit("c = ''.join((a, b))",       setup=s, number=n)
0.8546998891979456
>>>
>>> timeit("c = '%s%s' % (a, b)",       setup=s, number=n)
1.1699129864573479
>>>
>>> timeit("c = '{0}{1}'.format(a, b)", setup=s, number=n)
1.5954962372779846

This shows that unless your application's bottleneck is string concatenation, it's probably not worth being too concerned about...

The best case is ~0.45 seconds for 10 million iterations, or about 45ns per operation.
The worst case is ~1.59 seconds for 10 million iterations, or about 159ns per operation.

If you're performing literally millions of operations, you'll see a speed improvement of about 1 second.

Note that your results may vary quite drastically depending on the lengths (and number) of the strings you're concatenating, and the hardware you're running on.

What is the most efficient string concatenation method in Python?

If you know all components beforehand once, use the literal string interpolation, also known as f-strings or formatted strings, introduced in Python 3.6.

Given the test case from mkoistinen's answer, having strings

domain = 'some_really_long_example.com'
lang = 'en'
path = 'some/really/long/path/'

The contenders and their execution time on my computer using Python 3.6 on Linux as timed by IPython and the timeit module are

f'http://{domain}/{lang}/{path}' - 0.151 µs
'http://%s/%s/%s' % (domain, lang, path) - 0.321 µs
'http://' + domain + '/' + lang + '/' + path - 0.356 µs
''.join(('http://', domain, '/', lang, '/', path)) - 0.249 µs (notice that building a constant-length tuple is slightly faster than building a constant-length list).

Thus the shortest and the most beautiful code possible is also fastest.

^{The speed can be contrasted with the fastest method for Python 2, which is + concatenation on my computer; and that takes 0.203 µs with 8-bit strings, and 0.259 µs if the strings are all Unicode.}

^{(In alpha versions of Python 3.6 the implementation of f'' strings was the slowest possible - actually the generated byte code is pretty much equivalent to the ''.join() case with unnecessary calls to str.__format__ which without arguments would just return self unchanged. These inefficiencies were addressed before 3.6 final.)}

Any reason not to use '+' to concatenate two strings?

There is nothing wrong in concatenating two strings with +. Indeed it's easier to read than ''.join([a, b]).

You are right though that concatenating more than 2 strings with + is an O(n^2) operation (compared to O(n) for join) and thus becomes inefficient. However this has not to do with using a loop. Even a + b + c + ... is O(n^2), the reason being that each concatenation produces a new string.

CPython2.4 and above try to mitigate that, but it's still advisable to use join when concatenating more than 2 strings.

Is python += string concatenation bad practice?

Is it bad practice?

It's reasonable to assume that it isn't bad practice for this example because:

The author doesn't give any reason. Maybe it's just disliked by him/her.
Python documentation doesn't mention it's bad practice (from what I've seen).
foo += 'ooo' is just as readable (according to me) and is approximately 100 times faster than foo = ''.join([foo, 'ooo']).

When should one be used over the other?

Concatenation of strings have the disadvantage of needing to create a new string and allocate new memory for every concatenation! This is time consuming, but isn't that big of a deal with few and small strings. When you know the number of strings to concatenate and don't need more than maybe 2-4 concatenations I'd go for it.

When joining strings Python only has to allocate new memory for the final string, which is much more efficient, but could take longer to compute. Also, because strings are immutable it's often more practical to use a list of strings to dynamically mutate, and only convert it to a string when needed.

It's often convenient to create strings with str.join() since it takes an iterable. For example:

letters = ", ".join("abcdefghij")

To conclude

In most cases it makes more sense to use str.join() but there are times when concatenation is just as viable. Using any form of string concatenation for huge or many strings would be bad practice just as using str.join() would be bad practice for short and few strings, in my own opinion.

I believe that the author was just trying to create a rule of thumb to easier identify when to use what without going in too much detail or make it complicated.

What better way to concatenate string in python?

# Concatenates a and b with ' - ' or Coalesces them if one is None
'-'.join([x for x in (a,b) if x])

Edit
Here are the results of this algorithm (Note that None will work the same as ''):

>>> '-'.join([x for x in ('foo','bar') if x])
'foo-bar'
>>> '-'.join([x for x in ('foo','') if x])
'foo'
>>> '-'.join([x for x in ('','bar') if x])
'bar'
>>> '-'.join([x for x in ('','') if x])
''

*Also note that Rafael's assessment, in his post below, only showed a difference of .0002 secs over a 1000 iterations of the filter method, it can be reasoned that such a small difference can be due to inconsistencies in available system resources at the time of running the script. I ran his timeit implementation over several iteration and found that either algorithm will be faster about 50% of the time, neither by a wide margin. Thus showing they are basically equivalent.

How to concatenate a fixed string and a variable in Python

I'm guessing that you meant to do this:

msg['Subject'] = "Auto Hella Restart Report " + sys.argv[1]
# To concatenate strings in Python, use       ^

Most Pythonic way to concatenate strings

Have a look at Guido's essay on Python optimization. It covers converting lists of numbers to strings. Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, use the join example.