I found this programming problem while looking at a job posting on SO. I thought it was pretty interesting and as a beginner Python programmer I attempted to tackle it. However I feel my solution is quite...messy...can anyone make any suggestions to optimize it or make it cleaner? I know it's pretty trivial, but I had fun writing it. Note: Python 2.6
The problem:
Write pseudo-code (or actual code) for a function that takes in a string and returns the letter that appears the most in that string.
My attempt:
import string
def find_max_letter_count(word):
alphabet = string.ascii_lowercase
dictionary = {}
for letters in alphabet:
dictionary[letters] = 0
for letters in word:
dictionary[letters] += 1
dictionary = sorted(dictionary.items(),
reverse=True,
key=lambda x: x[1])
for position in range(0, 26):
print dictionary[position]
if position != len(dictionary) - 1:
if dictionary[position + 1][1] < dictionary[position][1]:
break
find_max_letter_count("helloworld")
Output:
>>>
('l', 3)
Updated example:
find_max_letter_count("balloon")
>>>
('l', 2)
('o', 2)
We initialize a variable "max" with the first character of the given string where "max" is the character with highest frequency.
We find maximum occurring character by using max() on values.
In order to find occurence of each character in a string we can use Map utility of Java.In Map a key could not be duplicate so make each character of string as key of Map and provide initial value corresponding to each key as 1 if this character does not inserted in map before.
Here's a way using FOR LOOP AND COUNT()
w = input()
r = 1
for i in w:
p = w.count(i)
if p > r:
r = p
s = i
print(s)
There are many ways to do this shorter. For example, you can use the Counter
class (in Python 2.7 or later):
import collections
s = "helloworld"
print(collections.Counter(s).most_common(1)[0])
If you don't have that, you can do the tally manually (2.5 or later has defaultdict
):
d = collections.defaultdict(int)
for c in s:
d[c] += 1
print(sorted(d.items(), key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)[0])
Having said that, there's nothing too terribly wrong with your implementation.
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