[Tutor] comparing files

[Kent Johnson]

The easiest way to speed up the search of the English word list is to put it in a dictionary (or set) instead of a list. Searching a long list can slow your program down a lot.

Another way to approach the problem would be to see if any of the original French words appear in the English text.

Kent


-----Original Message-----
From: tutor-bounces at python.org on behalf of Brian van den Broek
3) for each element in the MT output word list, check if it is in the 
reference word list. That will need a for loop and the in keyword. Using 
if test, augment appropriate counters as you go.

There are several ways that I can think of where you could speed this up, 
and surely a good many more that I haven't seen. For instance, once you 
get something like that going, you might think about breaking the standard 
word list up into sub-lists, one for words that start with 'a', etc. (This 
would reduce how many comparisons you have to make for each word.) You 
might also look to serialize (or store) those canonical word lists to save 
the step of constructing them each time. But, once you've got it done as I 
outline above, you should be well on your way to knowing how to improve it 
in these or other ways.