Counting Occurrence of Words in a Text File
tags: #python/documentation/dictionaries
This is very similar to how we would use dictionaries to count the number of occurrences of elements/items in a sequence (e.g., word or list).
Summary of Steps
- Use a For Loop to read through each line of text
- Use the
split()method to break each line into a list of words - Loop for each list of words (i.e., each line) and count each word using a dictionary
Sample:
# 1. Opening text file
fname = input('Enter file name: ')
try:
file = open(fname)
except:
print('Invalid file name')
# 2. creating empty dictionary as counter
count = dict()
for line in file: # for each line in the text file
line = line.rstrip() # removing whitespace and double spacing effect
words = line.split() # creating list of words
for word in words: # counting words and appending it to dict
if word not in count:
count[word] = 1
else:
count[word] = count[words] + 1
print(count)