slices to immutable strings by reference and not copy
<p>If you use <a href="http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#str.split" rel="nofollow"><em>string</em><code>.split()</code></a> on a Python string, it returns a list of strings.  These substrings that have been split-out are copies of their part of the parent string.</p>

<p>Is it possible to instead get some cheaper slice object that holds only a reference, offset and length to the bits split out?</p>

<p>And is it possible to have some 'string view' to extract and treat these sub-strings as if they are strings yet without making a copy of their bytes?</p>

<p>(I ask as I have very large strings I want to slice and am running out of memory occasionally; removing the copies would be a cheap profile-guided win.)</p>
