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

Posted by chen liu
chen liu
3,188 Points

Challenge Task of 1

Alright, this one might be a bit challenging but you've been doing great so far, so I'm sure you can manage it.

I need you to make a function named word_count. It should accept a single argument which will be a string. The function needs to return a dictionary. The keys in the dictionary will be each of the words in the string, lowercased. The values will be how many times that particular word appears in the string.

Check the comments below for an example.

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):
    string = string.lower()
    return { a:string.count(a) for a in set(string.replace(' ','')) }

1 Answer

Jonathan Fernandes
PLUS
Jonathan Fernandes
Courses Plus Student 22,784 Points
Jonathan Fernandes
Jonathan Fernandes
Courses Plus Student 22,784 Points

I find that it is easier if you split what you want to do up conception-ally.

The main point is you need to be able to do the following:

  • take a string and make it all lowercase
  • separate those strings into words
  • go through each word and add them to the dictionary with the value of 1
  • if you come across a word that is already in the dictionary, increment the value by one
  • return the string
def word_count(string):
    # take a string and make it all lowercase
    string = lower()

    # separate those strings into words
    string = string.split(' ')

    # go through each word and add them to the dictionary with the value of 1
    response = {}
    for item in string:
        if item in response:
            # if you come across a word that is already in the dictionary, increment the value by one
            response[item] += 1
        else:
            response[item] = 1
    # return the string
    return response

Does that help seeing it broken up into little pieces?

Andrew Kircher
Andrew Kircher
16,612 Points

I had a very similar code to yours but it doe not seem to take it

def word_count(string):
    string=string.lower()
    string_list=string.split(" ")
    string_dict={}
    for word in string_list:
        if word in string_dict:
            string_dict[word] += 1
        else:
            string_dict.update({word:1})
    return (string_dict)