Why and How Does Python Use Bloom Filters in String Processing?
Inside CPython's Clever Use of Bloom Filters for Efficient String Processing
The article says that CPython represents strings as UTF-8 encoded, which is not correct. The details about how it works are correct, just that's not UTF-8.
That's just a minor point though, nice article.
Hi @qwop, I am the author. Thank you for reading and the kind words. I would like to understand the error I made better so that I don't repeat in future, and if I can fix it. Could you please clarify?
UTF-8 is an encoding for unicode, that means it's a way of representing a unicode string as actual bytes on a computer.
It is variable length and works by using the first bits of each byte to indicate how many bytes are are needed to represent the current character.
Python also uses an encoding, as you describe in the article, but it's different to UTF-8. Unlike unicode, all characters in Python's representation of the unicode string use the same number of bytes, which is the maximum that any individual unicode character in the string needs.
I'd probably mess up a more detailed explanation of UTF-8 or Python's representation, so I'll let you look into how they work in more detail if you're interested.
