My dictionary counts letter instead of words

Question

I have made a text string and removed all non alphabetical symbols and added whitespaces in between the words, but when I add them to a dictionary to count the frequency of the words it counts the letters instead. How do I count the words from a dictionary?

dictionary = {}  

for item in text_string:
    if item in dictionary:
        dictionary[item] = dictionary[item]+1
    else:
        dictionary[item] = 1
print(dictionary)

How is python supposed to know what a "word" is? If you want to iterate over words, you have to split the string into words first. — Aran-Fey, Apr 26 '18 at 09:31
Just print stuff to see what you are working on. Do not suppose it should work. — Christophe Roussy, Apr 26 '18 at 09:35
The iterator on built-in `str` yields each character one by one, explaining what you are getting. To iterate on words, use `split` like others have mentionned in their answers ! — Valentin B., Apr 26 '18 at 09:41

Ivan Vinogradov · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-26T09:42:01.250

3

Change this

for item in text_string:

to this

for item in text_string.split():

Function .split() splits the string to words using whitespace characters (including tabs and newlines) as delimiters.

edited Apr 26 '18 at 09:42

answered Apr 26 '18 at 09:33

Ivan Vinogradov

4,269
6
29
39

1

And use counter instead pf doct it's better – Charif DZ Apr 26 '18 at 09:37

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 26 '18 at 09:35

You are very close. Since you state that your words are already whitespace separated, you need to use str.split to make a list of words.

An example is below:

dictionary = {}  

text_string = 'there are repeated words in this sring with many words many are repeated'

for item in text_string.split():
    if item in dictionary:
        dictionary[item] = dictionary[item]+1
    else:
        dictionary[item] = 1

print(dictionary)

{'there': 1, 'are': 2, 'repeated': 2, 'words': 2, 'in': 1,
 'this': 1, 'sring': 1, 'with': 1, 'many': 2}

Another solution is to use collections.Counter, available in the standard library:

from collections import Counter

text_string = 'there are repeated words in this sring with many words many are repeated'

c = Counter(text_string.split())

print(c)

Counter({'are': 2, 'repeated': 2, 'words': 2, 'many': 2, 'there': 1,
         'in': 1, 'this': 1, 'sring': 1, 'with': 1})

My dictionary counts letter instead of words

2 Answers2