>> about 800 MB in size containing tab separated data... my program
>> parses this file and stores its fields in a dictionary of lists.
...
>> currently, this is very slow in python, even if all i do is break up
>> each line using split() and store its values in a dictionary,
>> indexing by one of the tab separated values in the file.
Why not use the csv module and specify TAB as your delimiter?
reader = csv.reader(open(fname, "rb"))
for row in reader:
...
--
Skip Montanaro - [email protected] - http://www.smontanaro.net/
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list