10 ,most frequent words in a string Python

Question

I need to display the 10 most frequent words in a text file, from the most frequent to the least as well as the number of times it has been used. I can't use the dictionary or counter function. So far I have this:

import urllib
cnt = 0
i=0
txtFile = urllib.urlopen("http://textfiles.com/etext/FICTION/alice30.txt")
uniques = []
for line in txtFile:
    words = line.split()
    for word in words:
        if word not in uniques:
            uniques.append(word)
for word in words:
    while i<len(uniques):
        i+=1
        if word in uniques:
             cnt += 1
print cnt

Now I think I should look for every word in the array 'uniques' and see how many times it is repeated in this file and then add that to another array that counts the instance of each word. But this is where I am stuck. I don't know how to proceed.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you

Answer 1

The above problem can be easily done by using python collections below is the Solution.

from collections import Counter

data_set = "Welcome to the world of Geeks " \
"This portal has been created to provide well written well" \
"thought and well explained solutions for selected questions " \
"If you like Geeks for Geeks and would like to contribute " \
"here is your chance You can write article and mail your article " \
" to contribute at geeksforgeeks org See your article appearing on " \
"the Geeks for Geeks main page and help thousands of other Geeks. " \

# split() returns list of all the words in the string
split_it = data_set.split()

# Pass the split_it list to instance of Counter class.
Counters_found = Counter(split_it)
#print(Counters)

# most_common() produces k frequently encountered
# input values and their respective counts.
most_occur = Counters_found.most_common(4)
print(most_occur)

Answer 2

You're on the right track. Note that this algorithm is quite slow because for each unique word, it iterates over all of the words. A much faster approach without hashing would involve building a trie.

# The following assumes that we already have alice30.txt on disk.
# Start by splitting the file into lowercase words.
words = open('alice30.txt').read().lower().split()

# Get the set of unique words.
uniques = []
for word in words:
  if word not in uniques:
    uniques.append(word)

# Make a list of (count, unique) tuples.
counts = []
for unique in uniques:
  count = 0              # Initialize the count to zero.
  for word in words:     # Iterate over the words.
    if word == unique:   # Is this word equal to the current unique?
      count += 1         # If so, increment the count
  counts.append((count, unique))

counts.sort()            # Sorting the list puts the lowest counts first.
counts.reverse()         # Reverse it, putting the highest counts first.
# Print the ten words with the highest counts.
for i in range(min(10, len(counts))):
  count, word = counts[i]
  print('%s %d' % (word, count))