Performance issue

[Tom Carrick]

Hi,

In my attempted learning of python, I've decided to recode an old
anagram solving program I made in C++. The C++ version runs in less
than a second, while the python takes 30 seconds. I'm not willing to
think it's just python being slow, so I was hoping someone could find
a faster way of doing this. Also, I was wondering if there was a more
builtin, or just nicer way of converting a string to a list (or using
the sort function on a list) than making a function for it.

The words.txt here is just a copy of FreeBSD's /usr/share/dict/words

Anyway, the code:

import string

# Need a function to convert a string to a list to be
# able to use the sort() function
def string2list(s):
    l = []
    for i in range(0, len(s)):
        l.append(s[i])
    return l

words = []
found = []

anagram = raw_input("Find anagrams of word: ")

f = open('words.txt', 'r')
file = f.read()
f.close()

words = file.splitlines()

sorted_anagram = anagram.lower()
sorted_anagram = string2list(anagram)
sorted_anagram.sort(lambda x, y: cmp(x, y))


while words:
    if len(words[0]) == len(sorted_anagram):
        wordlist = string2list(words[0])
        wordlist.sort(lambda x, y: cmp(x, y))
        sorted_wordlist = wordlist
        if sorted_anagram == sorted_wordlist:
            found.append(words[0])
    del words[0]

print "Anagrams of " + anagram + ": "
while found:
    print found[0] + " "
    del found[0]