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

In the word count challenge, is it bad practice to have my program raise an exception for each "new" word?

I am wondering if it is normal to have my program raise exceptions like this for each new word that is not found in the list as a normal part of the programs operation. That is, is it a bad habit to use exception raising in this way? Should I be doing this differently, or does it not really matter?

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):
    word_count_dict = {}
    for word in string.lower().split():
        try:
            word_count_dict[word] += 1
        except KeyError:
            word_count_dict[word] = 1
    return word_count_dict

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,275 Points

I'm not sure if this would constitute "bad practice", but rather than causing and catching errors you could easily perform a test to determine which action to take:

        if word in word_count_dict:
            word_count_dict[word] += 1
        else:
            word_count_dict[word] = 1

That seems like a better may to do it. Thanks Steven! I am so new to this, that I'm sure the solutions I come up with will be "unnecessarily creative" at times and I understand that is something to be avoided in python.