Question

I have a function that – as a larger part of a different program – checks to see if a word entry is in a text file. So if the text file looks like this:

aardvark
aardvark's
aardvarks
abaci
.
.
.
zygotes

I just ran a quick if statement

infile = open("words","r")  #  Words is the file with all the words. . . yeah.
text = infile.read()

if word in text:
  return 1
else:
  return 0

Works, sort-of. The problem is, while it returns true for aardvark, and false for wj;ek, it also will return true for any SUBSET of any word. So, for example, the word rdva will come back as a ‘word’ because it IS in the file, as a subset of aardvark. I need it to match whole words only, and I’ve been quite stumped.

So how can I have it match an entire word (which is equivalent to an entire line, here) or nothing?

I apologize if this question is answered elsewhere, I searched before I posted!

Many Thanks!

Answer 1

Iterate over each line and see if the whole line matches:

def in_dictionary(word):
  for line in open('words', 'r').readlines():
    if word == line.strip():
      return True

  return False

• When you use the in statement, you are basically asking whether the word is in the line.
• Using == matches the whole line.
• .strip() removes leading and trailing whitespace, which will cause hello to not equal {space}hello