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Python Python Collections (2016, retired 2019) Dictionaries Word Count

Posted by taejooncho
taejooncho
Courses Plus Student 3,923 Points

A question in the word count exercise

You can see the question written in the comment in the code, but to summarize.

My code as far as making split words as key and the count number of the word as values in the new dictionary works.

The issue is even though I used a for loop it only takes one of the split item, not all of the items.

I tried using while loop only to find the same result.

Why is it doing this? Thank you in advance.

wordcount.py 
# E.g. word_count("I do not like it Sam I Am") gets back a dictionary like:
# {'i': 2, 'do': 1, 'it': 1, 'sam': 1, 'like': 1, 'not': 1, 'am': 1}
# Lowercase the string to make it easier.
def word_count(string):
    x = list(string.lower().split())
    for items in x:
        new_dict = dict([[items, x.count(items)]])  
    return new_dict 

# when I tried this code with a string value ("I do not like it Sam I Am") on eclipe 
# with return replaced with print function
word_count("I do not like it Sam I Am")
# the new_dict comes out to be just this {"am": 1}
# It does not include all the splitted items in the list x.

# Why is it only giving me one of the splitted item, when I used a for loop?
# Since I used a for loop I expected that the loop was going to continue 
# until every split item was included..
# What am I doing wrong?

1 Answer

Jon Mirow
Jon Mirow
9,864 Points

Hi there!

Your for loop is making a new dictionary each time, not adding a new item to the dictionary, so when you get to the end of the loop, there's only one item in the dictionary as each other iteration has written over new_dict with a different dictionary.

Also beware of using count for this. count() returns the number of times a substring appears in a given string, not the number of times a word appears. For example, the word "i" will appear in "we rolled down the hills again and again" 3 times according to count :)

Hope it helps!