Showing words in file that start with a specific letter

Question

My code is able to show each word that starts with a specific letter from a text file, but I want it to not show duplicate words. Here is my code:

with open('text.txt','r') as myFile:
    data=myFile.read().lower()

for s in data.split():
    if s.startswith("r"):
        print(s)

Like I said, my code does print the words but it shows duplicates. Thank you for helping

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 13 '18 at 20:09

2

Use a set:

with open('text.txt', 'r') as myFile:
    data = myFile.read().lower()

    seen = set()
    for s in data.split():
        if s not in seen and s.startswith("r"):
            seen.add(s)
            print(s)

answered Nov 13 '18 at 20:09

Dani Mesejo

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 13 '18 at 20:13

This is an optimized version the will read the file line by line without loading it all into memory:

seen_words = set()

with open('text.txt', 'r') as my_file:
    for line in my_file:
        for word in line.lower().split():
            if word not in seen_words:
                print(word)
                seen_words.add(word)

Showing words in file that start with a specific letter

2 Answers2