Terry Reedy: > I believe > wordlist = open('words.txt','r').read().split('\n') > should give you the list in Python.
This looks better (but it keeps the newlines too. Untested. Python 2.x): words = open("words.txt").readlines() for i, word in enumerate(words): if word.startswith("b"): print words[i+1] break Another possibility (untested, lazy, uses less memory, probably better): fin = open("words.txt") last_word = fin.next() for word in fin: if last_word.startswith("b"): print word break else: last_word = word fin.close() A note for the original poster: I suggest you to try to learn string methods (not the string module), they are designed to avoid you to use regular expressions most of the times, and they are faster and more readable too. I have seen that people that learn Python coming from Perl are often 'blind' to their existence. Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list