python timeit.timer,什么是python中的％timeit？

I always read the code to calculate the time like this way:

%timeit function()

Can you explain what means "%" here?

I think, the "%" is always used to replace something in a string, like %s means replace a string, %d replace a data, but I have no idea about this case.

解决方案

%timeit is an ipython magic function, which can be used to time a particular piece of code (A single execution statement, or a single method)

From the docs:

%timeit

Time execution of a Python statement or expression

Usage, in line mode:

%timeit [-n -r [-t|-c] -q -p

-o] statement

To use it, for example if we want to find out whether using xrange is any faster than using range, you can simply do:

In [1]: %timeit for _ in range(1000): True

10000 loops, best of 3: 37.8 µs per loop

In [2]: %timeit for _ in xrange(1000): True

10000 loops, best of 3: 29.6 µs per loop

And you will get the timings for them.

The major advantage is that you don't have to import timer.timeit, and run the code multiple times to figure out which is the better approach; %timeit will automatically calculate number of runs required for your code based on a total of 2 seconds execution window.