Python if not == vs if !=

Question

What is the difference between these two lines of code:

if not x == \'val\':

and

if x != \'val\':

Is one

Answer 1

@jonrsharpe has an excellent explanation of what's going on. I thought I'd just show the difference in time when running each of the 3 options 10,000,000 times (enough for a slight difference to show).

Code used:

def a(x):
    if x != 'val':
        pass


def b(x):
    if not x == 'val':
        pass


def c(x):
    if x == 'val':
        pass
    else:
        pass


x = 1
for i in range(10000000):
    a(x)
    b(x)
    c(x)

And the cProfile profiler results:

So we can see that there is a very minute difference of ~0.7% between if not x == 'val': and if x != 'val':. Of these, if x != 'val': is the fastest.

However, most surprisingly, we can see that

if x == 'val':
        pass
    else:

is in fact the fastest, and beats if x != 'val': by ~0.3%. This isn't very readable, but I guess if you wanted a negligible performance improvement, one could go down this route.