I am trying to search hindi words contained one line per file in file-1 and find them in lines in file-2. I have to print the line numbers with the number of words found. This is the code: import codecs hypernyms = codecs.open("hindi_hypernym.txt", "r", "utf-8").readlines() words = codecs.open("hypernyms_en2hi.txt", "r", "utf-8").readlines() count_arr = [] for counter, line in enumerate(hypernyms): count_arr.append(0) for word in words: if line.find(word) >=0: count_arr[counter] +=1 for iterator, count in enumerate(count_arr): if count>0: print iterator, ' ', count This is finding some words, but ignoring some others The input files are: File-1: ???? ??????? File-2: ???????, ????-???? ?????-???, ?????-???, ?????_???, ?????_??? ????_????, ????-????, ???????_???? ????-???? This gives output: 0 1 3 1 Clearly, it is ignoring ??????? and searching for ???? only. I have tried with other inputs as well. It only searches for one word. Any idea how to correct this?