Trying to find frequency of words. Is there some way to count the letter as its own word?

user_11610695 0
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I'm trying to count the frequency in which a word is used. If I say "hi im Nick" it will give me one count for each word. I followed the book but when I do something like "i am high as a kite" I get 3 counts for i and a. Is there a way to only count i and a by themselves?

txt = "i am high as a kite"

x = txt.split(" ")

for num_of_instances in x:
    count = txt.count(num_of_instances)
    print(num_of_instances, count)
python-3.x
2 Answers

Just do:

x.count(num_of_instances)

instead of:

txt.count(num_of_instances)

still, this will repeat counting repeating words in sentences like "to be or not to be" (be and to will be counted twice), better use a set to remove these duplicates (however you will lose the order in which the words appear):

txt = "to be or not to be"

x = txt.split(" ")

for num_of_instances in set(x):
    count = x.count(num_of_instances)
    print(num_of_instances, count)

Output (the order may change each time you execute the code):

be 2
to 2
not 1
or 1

It's better if you use a Counter object:

from collections import Counter
txt = "to be or not to be"
x = Counter(txt.split(" "))

for word, count in x.items():
    print(word, count)

Output:

to 2
be 2
or 1
not 1
user_62751030

May I recommend using the collections module that comes with Python's standard library?

>>> import collections
>>> text = 'i am high as a kite'
>>> word_count = collections.Counter(text.split())
>>> word_count
Counter({'i': 1, 'am': 1, 'high': 1, 'as': 1, 'a': 1, 'kite': 1})
>>> character_count = collections.Counter(text)
>>> character_count
Counter({' ': 5, 'i': 3, 'a': 3, 'h': 2, 'm': 1, 'g': 1, 's': 1, 'k': 1, 't': 1, 'e': 1})
>>>

It has a class in it called Counter that is built entirely for the purpose of counting things for you. Its interface is somewhat similar to the language's built-in dict type. You can find its documentation using this link.

user_2163560
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