Loops in Python: Why is python not treating the contents as one long string?

Question

Here is something I found curious about python loops.

This loop run each character in a string

def avoids(word,letters):
 flag = True
 for letter in letters:
 if(letter in word):
 flag = False
 return flag

The loop below (at the bottom) runs each line of the file

fin = open('wordplay.txt');
user_input = raw_input('Enter some characters: ')
count = 0
for line in fin:
 word = line.strip()
 if(avoids(word, user_input)):
 count += 1;

This is just too convenient. Basically my question is: Why is python not treating the contents of wordplay.txt as one long string and looping each character?

Any comment is greatly appreciate.

Answer 1

Because the iterator for file-like objects iterates over lines, not characters.

Answer 2

Your code is not treating the contents of wordplay.txt as one long string because 'for line in fin:' tells it to read line-by-line.

If you want to read the entire contents, use the read() method:

 file_content = fin.read()