Scooter: > I'm reading in a text file, and for each line in the file, I'm looking > for the existence of phrases from a list. The list contains approx. > 120 items currently but will most likely grow. This procedure itself > is not the main function of my program and only grew out of the need > to reformat certain phrases I'm finding in a file before re-outputting > it. But as I suspected, this searching of the lists slows the whole > process way way down. Was looking for ideas of a better way to do > this.
Know your basic computer science :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aho-Corasick_algorithm There are probably C implementations that can be used from Python, like: http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/ahocorasick/ Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list