How to split each words from several lines of a word file? (python)

Question

I have a text file:

But soft what light through yonder window breaks
It is the east and Juliet is the sun
Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon
Who is already          


        

Answer 1

I understand what you are trying to achieve. Instead of the way you wrote it, here is a simpler approach:

import re
ls=set(re.findall(r"[\w']+", text)) #text is the input
print(sorted(ls))

Tested it to make sure it works:

EDIT:

I modified your code a bit to satisfy your use case.

fh = open(raw_input("Enter file name: "),'r')
lst = list()
for line in fh:
    words = line[:-1].split(" ")
    for word in words:
        if word not in lst:
            lst.append(word)
print(sorted(lst))

Output:

Enter file name: file.txt
['Arise', 'But', 'It', 'Juliet', 'Who', 'already', 'and', 'breaks', 'east', 'envious', 'fair', 'grie', 'is', 'kill', 'light', 'moon', 'pale', 'sick', 'soft', 'sun', 'the', 'through', 'what', 'window', 'with', 'yonder']

Hope that solves your problem.