Iterating through String word at a time in Python

Question

I have a string buffer of a huge text file. I have to search a given words/phrases in the string buffer. Whats the efficient way to do it ?

I tried using re module matches. But As i have a huge text corpus that i have to search through. This is taking large amount of time.

Given a Dictionary of words and Phrases.

I iterate through the each file, read that into string , search all the words and phrases in the dictionary and increment the count in the dictionary if the keys are found.

One small optimization that we thought was to sort the dictionary of phrases/words with the max number of words to lowest. And then compare each word start position from the string buffer and compare the list of words. If one phrase is found, we don search for the other phrases (as it matched the longest phrase ,which is what we want)

Can some one suggest how to go about word by word in the string buffer. (Iterate string buffer word by word) ?

Also, Is there any other optimization that can be done on this ?

data = str(file_content)
for j in dictionary_entity.keys():
    cnt = data.count(j+" ")
    if cnt != -1:
        dictionary_entity[j] = dictionary_entity[j] + cnt
f.close()

Answer 1

Iterating word-by-word through the contents of a file (the Wizard of Oz from Project Gutenberg, in my case), three different ways:

from __future__ import with_statement
import time
import re
from cStringIO import StringIO

def word_iter_std(filename):
    start = time.time()
    with open(filename) as f:
        for line in f:
            for word in line.split():
                yield word
    print 'iter_std took %0.6f seconds' % (time.time() - start)

def word_iter_re(filename):
    start = time.time()
    with open(filename) as f:
        txt = f.read()
    for word in re.finditer('\w+', txt):
        yield word
    print 'iter_re took %0.6f seconds' % (time.time() - start)

def word_iter_stringio(filename):
    start = time.time()
    with open(filename) as f:
        io = StringIO(f.read())
    for line in io:
        for word in line.split():
            yield word
    print 'iter_io took %0.6f seconds' % (time.time() - start)

woo = '/tmp/woo.txt'

for word in word_iter_std(woo): pass
for word in word_iter_re(woo): pass
for word in word_iter_stringio(woo): pass

Resulting in:

% python /tmp/junk.py
iter_std took 0.016321 seconds
iter_re took 0.028345 seconds
iter_io took 0.016230 seconds