Given this file:
$ cat words.txt
line1 word1 word2
line2 word3 word4
line3 word5 word6
If you just want one word at a time (ignoring the meaning of spaces vs line breaks in the file):
with open('words.txt','r') as f:
for line in f:
for word in line.split():
print(word)
Prints:
line1
word1
word2
line2
...
word6
Similarly, if you want to flatten the file into a single flat list of words in the file, you might do something like this:
with open('words.txt') as f:
flat_list=[word for line in f for word in line.split()]
>>> flat_list
['line1', 'word1', 'word2', 'line2', 'word3', 'word4', 'line3', 'word5', 'word6']
Which can create the same output as the first example with print '\n'.join(flat_list)...
Or, if you want a nested list of the words in each line of the file (for example, to create a matrix of rows and columns from a file):
with open('words.txt') as f:
matrix=[line.split() for line in f]
>>> matrix
[['line1', 'word1', 'word2'], ['line2', 'word3', 'word4'], ['line3', 'word5', 'word6']]
If you want a regex solution, which would allow you to filter wordN vs lineN type words in the example file:
import re
with open("words.txt") as f:
for line in f:
for word in re.findall(r'\bword\d+', line):
# wordN by wordN with no lineN
Or, if you want that to be a line by line generator with a regex:
with open("words.txt") as f:
(word for line in f for word in re.findall(r'\w+', line))