what's a simple way to search a very long text file for a word in python?

I want to create a very开发者_JS百科 simple spell checker using a text file with an alphabetized list of about 80000 common words.

What's a simple but efficient way to search the file and find out if it contains a word using python?

Should I parse the word list file into a set, list, dictionary, tuple?

Is there an easy way to take advantage of the fact that my word list is already alphabetized?

I'd prefer to keep it relatively simple. I don't want corrected spelling recommendations or other fancy features. I just want to know if the word is miss-spelled.

Since 80000 words will easily fit in memory, you are best off using a set:

words = set(line.strip() for line in open("words"))

This won't take advantage of the fact that your file is already sorted, but it is the most efficient way anyway. To look up a word w, you can use

w in words

which is amortised O(1).

Put your dict words in a set which has a constant lookup time.

myDict = set([<actual list of words here>])
for word in file:
    if word not in myDict:
        handleBadWord(word)