Python append words to a list from file
<p>I'm writing a program to read text from a file into a list, split it into a list of words using the split function. And for each word, I need to check it if its already in the list, if not I need to add it to the list using the append function.</p>

<p>The desired output is:</p>

<pre><code>['Arise', 'But', 'It', 'Juliet', 'Who', 'already', 'and', 'breaks', 'east', 'envious', 'fair', 'grief', 'is', 'kill', 'light', 'moon', 'pale', 'sick', 'soft', 'sun', 'the', 'through', 'what', 'window', 'with', 'yonder']
</code></pre>

<p>My output is :</p>

<pre><code>[['But', 'soft', 'what', 'light', 'through', 'yonder', 'window', 'breaks', 'It', 'is', 'the', 'east', 'and', 'Juliet', 'is', 'the', 'sun', 'Arise', 'fair', 'sun', 'and', 'kill', 'the', 'envious', 'moon', 'Who', 'is', 'already', 'sick', 'and', 'pale', 'with', 'grief']]
</code></pre>

<p>I have been trying to sort it and remove the double square brackets "[[ &amp; ]]" in the begining and end but I'm not able to do so. And fo some reason the sort() function does not seem to work.</p>

<p>Please let me know where I am making a mistake.</p>

<pre><code>word_list = []
word_list = [open('romeo.txt').read().split()]
for item in word_list:
    if item in word_list:
        continue
    else:
        word_list.append(item)
word_list.sort()
print word_list
</code></pre>