Python 2.7 - find and replace from text file, using dictionary, to new text file

Question

I am newbie to programming, and have been studying python in my spare time for the past few months. I decided I was going to try and create a little script that converts Ame

Answer 1

As all the good answers above, I wrote a new version which I think is more pythonic, wish this helps:

# imported dictionary contains 1800 english:american spelling key:value pairs.
mydict = {
    'color': 'colour',
}


def replace_all(text, mydict):
    for english, american in mydict.iteritems():
        text = text.replace(american, english)
    return text

try:
    with open('new_output.txt', 'w') as new_file:
        with open('test_file.txt', 'r') as f:
            for line in f:
                new_line = replace_all(line, mydict)
                new_file.write(new_line)
except:
    print "Can't open file!"

Also you can see the answer I asked before, it contains many best practice advices: Loading large file (25k entries) into dict is slow in Python?

Here is a few other tips about how to write python more python:) http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/handout.html

Good luck:)