fastest way for humongous regexp search?

[Tim Arnold]

Hi,
I've got a list of 1000 common misspellings, and I'd like to check a set of
text files for those misspellings.
I'm trying to figure out the fastest way to do it; here's what I'm doing now
(below).

I'm still learning Python, love it, and I'm pretty sure that what I'm doing
is naive.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this,
--Tim
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
(1) Create one humongous regexp, compile it and cPickle it. The regexp is
like this:

misspelled = (
'\\bjudgement\\b|' +
'\\bjudgemental\\b|' +

<snip><snip><snip>

'\\bYorksire\\b|' +
'\\bYoyages\\b')

p = re.compile(misspelled, re.I)
f = open('misspell.pat', 'w')
cPickle.dump(p,f)
f.close()
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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(2) Check the file(s), report the misspelling, the line number and the
actual line of text.
   - only warns on multiple identical misspellings
   - using 'EtaOinShrdlu' as a nonsense line-marker; tried \n but that
didn't give correct results.
   - running on HP Unix, Python 2.2

f = open('misspell.pat', 'r')
p = cPickle.load(f)

a = open('myfile.txt').readlines()
s = 'EtaOinShrdlu'.join(a)

mistake = {}
for mMatch in p.findall(s):
    if mistake.get(mMatch,0):
        print 'Warning: multiple occurrences of mistake "%s" ' % mMatch
    else:
        mistake[mMatch] = s.count('EtaOinShrdlu', 0, s.index(mMatch))

for k, v in mistake.items():
    print 'Misspelling: "%s" on line number %d' % (k, mistake[k]+1)
    print '%s \n' % a[mistake[k]]