Quick compare string to list

Wed Sep 30 15:03:31 EDT 2009

Scooter wrote:
> 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.
>> I basically have
>> mylist=[]
> ...
> code that reads in the flat file into string 'flatfileString'
> ...
> for listitem in mylist:
> if flatfileString.count(listitem):
> ...whatever...I found it.

I would try:
turn mylist into my_re and compile
for line in file:
 while search line for first occurence of any phase returns yes:
 process
 reduce line to remainder of line after phrase found
 # assuming no overlaps
tjr