Iterate through words of a file in Python

Question

I need to iterate through the words of a large file, which consists of a single, long long line. I am aware of methods iterating through the file line by line, however they are not applicable in my case, because of its single line structure.

Any alternatives?

Answer 1

It really depends on your definition of word. But try this:

f = file("your-filename-here").read()
for word in f.split():
    # do something with word
    print word

This will use whitespace characters as word boundaries.

Of course, remember to properly open and close the file, this is just a quick example.