Reading words from a file and putting into list

Question

Essentially, I have a huge file and all the file contains are multiple words per line, each separated by a space. Kind of like this:

WORD WORD WORD WORD
ANOTHER
WORD SCRABBLE BLAH
YES NO 

What I want to do is put all the words in the file into one huge list, I tried using split but that didn't account for the new lines(\n)

Answer 1

Reading via for line in f splits on newline and it's efficient memory-wise (it reads one line at a time) but putting everything in a huge list is not. Anyway, if you insist:

huge_list = []

with open(huge_file, "r") as f:
    for line in f:
        huge_list.extend(line.split())

To read the whole file into memory as a string, use f.read() instead:

huge_list = []

with open(huge_file, "r") as f:
    huge_list = f.read().split()

---

Input file (words separated by spaces and newlines):

WORD WORD WORD WORD
ANOTHER
WORD SCRABBLE BLAH
YES NO 

Output of both examples:

>>> huge_list
['WORD', 'WORD', 'WORD', 'WORD', 'ANOTHER', 'WORD', 'SCRABBLE', 'BLAH', 'YES', 'NO']
>>>