Python word count program

If so, you can put it under this line:. This means in simple English : Only run this code if I am running this file from the command line or something similar. If we import this file in another, all of this code will be ignored. By using this syntax, you can ensure your function only runs when someone calls your program directly, and not imports is as a module.

It is optional in our case, but good practice in case you want to turn your code into a library. Remember we imported the sys library? It contains several system calls, one of which is the sys. You already know our old friend len. We check if the number of command line arguments is less than two the first is always the name of the file , and if so, print a message and exit.

This is what happens:. As I said, the first element of sys. The second will be the file the user entered. We read that. And now we call our functions to count the number of words and lines, and print the results. A simple word counter. Baby steps: Read and print a file Okay folks, we are going to start gentle.

And now, to test our code. If you are on Linux, you can just type:. You might have to make the file executable. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.

And there you go. Your First Python program. Count words and lines Okay, so we can read a file and print it on the screen. We open the file and read it. In [1]: "I am a boy". Here, I split on a comma: In [2]: "The birds, they are flying away, he said. Next, we find the number of lines by using the same method. Count lines fixed! Coming back to our code, for l in lines: if not l: lines.

We will beak our code into functions now. You can call the file as an external library. This is what happens: python. Sign up to know when the next post is out, and get exclusive content Enter your email. If we want to know the number of times every word occurred, we can make a function for that.

If we want to know how many times a particular word occur in a string in an interval, we can use start and end parameters of count. In the current era, data is very important. And as the world of Data Science is growing rapidly, and that too using python, data preprocessing is very important. We need to count words in a string in python to preprocess textual data and for that, the above-discussed methods are very important.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Trenton McKinney Tim Pietzcker Tim Pietzcker k 55 55 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Making the string to lower. The split will spit the line into a list. Fuji Komalan Fuji Komalan 1, 11 11 silver badges 24 24 bronze badges. David Hoelzer You can check example validity at compileonline. I can't see this being what you intended.

Modifying your answer. If you are using graphLab, you can use this function. Wesam Na Wesam Na 1, 23 23 silver badges 21 21 bronze badges. Sivaji Sivaji 11 2 2 bronze badges. Please add some explanation. Sanj Sanj 21 1 1 bronze badge. This would be a better answer if you explained how the code you provided answers the question.

Dima Kozhevin 3, 9 9 gold badges 36 36 silver badges 51 51 bronze badges.