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

Posted by George-Stefan Haineala
George-Stefan Haineala
975 Points

Word count

Hi,

This code is supposed to count the number of words in a string and return a dict with the word as key and the number of times that it appears as a value..and it does just that..but when i check work it doesnt pass. Any idea why?

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(str1):
    diction = {}
    str1 = str1.lower()
    list1 = str1.split(' ')
    for i in list1:
        if i:
            x = list1.count(i)
            dict2 = {i:x}
            diction.update(dict2)
    return diction

1 Answer

Chris Freeman
MOD
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,441 Points
Chris Freeman
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,441 Points

You are very close. While this works on the sample string, it doesn't work for strings that might have multiple spaces:

>>> "a b c  d e". split(' ')
['a', 'b', 'c', '', 'd', 'e']
>>> "a b c  d e". split()
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']

See more at str.split() docs.