Finding least common elements in a list

Question

I want to generate an ordered list of the least common words within a large body of text, with the least common word appearing first along with a value indicating how many times it appears in the text.

I scraped the text from some online journal articles, then simply assigned and split;

article_one = """ large body of text """.split() 
=> ("large","body", "of", "text")

Seems like a regex would be appropriate for the next steps, but being new to programming I'm not well versed- If the best answer includes a regex, could someone point me to a good regex tutorial other than pydoc?

Answer 1

How about a shorter/simpler version with a defaultdict, Counter is nice but needs Python 2.7, this works from 2.5 and up :)

import collections

counter = collections.defaultdict(int)
article_one = """ large body of text """

for word in article_one.split():
    counter[word] += 1

print sorted(counter.iteritems(), key=lambda x: x[::-1])

Answer 2

Finding least common elements in a list. According to Counter class in Collections module

c.most_common()[:-n-1:-1]       # n least common elements

So Code for least common element in list is

from collections import Counter
Counter( mylist ).most_common()[:-2:-1]

Two least common elements is

from collections import Counter
Counter( mylist ).most_common()[:-3:-1]

python-3.x