Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

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

What's wrong with this this program? The program returns the correct values. but treehouse says otherwise

Bummer: Hmm, didn't get the expected output. Be sure you're lowercasing the string and splitting on all whitespace!

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(passing_string):
    passing_string = passing_string.lower()
    passing_string = passing_string.split(' ')
    dictionary = {}

    for word in passing_string:
        num = passing_string.count(word)
        dictionary.update({word:num})
    return dictionary

1 Answer

Oskar Lundberg
Oskar Lundberg
9,534 Points

Hello Gasly! The problem is that you are splitting the string on all blankspaces, not whitespaces. Your function surely returns the right value when the example string is being used, but might not for some other string. If you just do one small change, your code will pass perfectly.

    passing_string = passing_string.split()

^ This splits on all whitespaces, like blankspaces, tabs and newlines (Use this above method)

    passing_string = passing_string.split(' ')

^This only splits on blankspaces. Hope this helps :D

Thanks for the help!