Why doesn't my function pass the coding challenge? Its output is the same as the example.

Question

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.

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()
    string_list1 = string.split(" ")
    string_list2 = string_list1[:]
    string_dictionary = {}
    for item1 in string_list1:
        counter = 0
        index = 0
        for item2 in string_list2:
            if item2 == item1:
                counter += 1
                string_list2.pop(index)
            index +=1
        if counter > 0:
            string_dictionary[item1] = counter
    return string_dictionary

Answer 1 · 2018-04-07T19:38:22Z

April 7, 2018 7:38pm

The error message you get contains this hint: "Be sure you're lowercasing the string and splitting on all whitespace!"

For a "split" to work on "all whitespace", the argument should be left empty. Providing a space argument causes it split specifically (and only) on every space.

Also, it's not clear why you would "pop" anything from the second list, since by doing so you would be likely to get an inaccurate count when you encounter a repeated word again in the outer loop.

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