Python: load words from file into a set

Question

Hello,

I have a simple text file with several thousands of words, each in its own line, e.g.

aardvark
hello
piper

I use the following code to load the words into a set (I need the list of words to test membership, so set is the data structure I chose):

my_set = set(open('filename.txt'))

The above code produces a set with the following entries (each word is followed by a space and new-line character:

("aardvark \n", "hello \n", "piper \n")

What's the simplest way to load the file into a set but get rid of the space and \n?

Thanks

Answer 1

my_set = set(map(str.strip, open('filename.txt')))

Answer 2

The strip() method of strings removes whitespace from both ends.

set(line.strip() for line in open('filename.txt'))

Answer 3

To remove only the right hand spaces.

set(map(str.rstrip, open('filename.txt')))

Answer 4

if your words doesn't contain space i.e. one word per line or may be you can have multiple words per line just use

words=  set(open('filename.txt').read().split())

Answer 5

with open("filename.txt") as f:
    mySet = map(str.rstrip, f)

If you want to use this in Python 2.5, you need

from __future__ import with_statement

Answer 6

with open("filename.txt") as f:
    s = set([line.rstrip('\n') for line in f])