Letter frequency in python

Question

I need to make a program that prints out the frequency of letters in a text file and compares that frequency with that of another in python.

So far I am able to print the number of times a letter occurs, but the percentage frequency I get is wrong. I think it is because I need my program to count only the number of letters in the file by removing all the spaces and other characters.

def addLetter (x):
    result = ord(x) - ord(a)
    return result


#start of the main program
#prompt user for a file

while True:
    speech = raw_input("Enter file name:")

    wholeFile = open(speech, 'r+').read()
    lowlet = wholeFile.lower()
    letters= list(lowlet)
    alpha = list('abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz')
    n = len(letters)
    f = float(n)
    occurrences = {}
    d = {}


    #number of letters
    for x in alpha:
        occurrences[x] = letters.count(x)
        d[x] =(occurrences[x])/f
    for x in occurrences:
        print x, occurrences[x], d[x]

This is the output

Enter file name:dems.txt
a 993 0.0687863674148
c 350 0.0242449431976
b 174 0.0120532003325
e 1406 0.0973954003879
d 430 0.0297866444999
g 219 0.015170407315
f 212 0.0146855084511
i 754 0.0522305347742
h 594 0.0411471321696
k 81 0.00561097256858
j 12 0.000831255195345
m 273 0.0189110556941
l 442 0.0306178996952
o 885 0.0613050706567
n 810 0.0561097256858
q 9 0.000623441396509
p 215 0.0148933222499
s 672 0.0465502909393
r 637 0.0441257966196
u 305 0.021127736215
t 1175 0.0813937378775
w 334 0.0231366029371
v 104 0.00720421169299
y 212 0.0146855084511
x 13 0.000900526461624
z 6 0.000415627597672
Enter file name:

The program does print in columns, but I'm not really sure how to display that here.

the frequency for "a" should be .0878

Answer 1

You could use the translator recipe to drop all characters not in alpha. Since doing so makes letters contain nothing but characters from alpha, n is now the correct denominator.

You could then use a collections.defaultdict(int) to count the occurrences of the letters:

import collections
import string

def translator(frm='', to='', delete='', keep=None):
    # Python Cookbook Recipe 1.9
    # Chris Perkins, Raymond Hettinger
    if len(to) == 1: to = to * len(frm)
    trans = string.maketrans(frm, to)
    if keep is not None:
        allchars = string.maketrans('', '')
        # delete is expanded to delete everything except
        # what is mentioned in set(keep)-set(delete)
        delete = allchars.translate(allchars, keep.translate(allchars, delete))
    def translate(s):
        return s.translate(trans, delete)
    return translate

alpha = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
keep_alpha=translator(keep=alpha)

while True:
    speech = raw_input("Enter file name:")
    wholeFile = open(speech, 'r+').read()
    lowlet = wholeFile.lower()
    letters = keep_alpha(lowlet)
    n = len(letters)
    occurrences = collections.defaultdict(int)    
    for x in letters:
        occurrences[x]+=1
    for x in occurrences:
        print x, occurrences[x], occurrences[x]/float(n)