If you know that the input data is ASCII-encoded (or Unicode-encoded and capable of being ASCII-encoded), then using Python's cStringIO package (http://docs.pyt

If you know that the input data is ASCII-encoded (or Unicode-encoded and capable of being ASCII-encoded), then using Python's cStringIO package (http://docs.python.org/library/stringio.html http://docs.python.org/library/stringio.html) is preferential for the significant speed boost.