why doesn't this return my dictionary?

fishing for insight

i used regex instead of splitting the string because i just learned it and its more comfortable to work with for the moment. i had a + instead of an * in my findall() but it didn't catch the word "a" until i switched. a little fuzzy on why "a" is not " at least 1 " instance of a word char.

it tells me "bummer" and to make sure i lowercased and split on whitespaces.

when i run this in my python shell or atom runner, everything works perfectly.

these are what i tested it with: word_count("hello my baby hello my honey hello my ragtime gal")

word_count("tHis is a tesT,. and ,STuff A ,iS, test")

word_count("What is up with this stuff? What is up with anything? pants.")

whats up with this stuff? ha. thanks.

import re

def word_count(string):
    word_list = []
    word_list = re.findall(r'[\w]*[^\W]', string)
    dct = {}
    for word in word_list:
        word = word.lower()
        if word in dct:
            count = dct[word] + 1
            dct.update({word: count})
        else:
            dct.update({word: 1})

    return dct


# 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.