How to get words frequency in efficient way with ruby?

Question

Sample input:

\"I was 09809 home -- Yes! yes!  You was\"

and output:

{ \'yes\' => 2, \'was\' => 2, \'i\' => 1, \'home\         


        

Answer 1

This works but I am kinda new to Ruby too. There might be a better solution.

def count_words(string)
  words = string.split(' ')
  frequency = Hash.new(0)
  words.each { |word| frequency[word.downcase] += 1 }
  return frequency
end

Instead of .split(' '), you could also do .scan(/\w+/); however, .scan(/\w+/) would separate aren and t in "aren't", while .split(' ') won't.

Output of your example code:

print count_words('I was 09809 home -- Yes! yes!  You was');

#{"i"=>1, "was"=>2, "09809"=>1, "home"=>1, "yes"=>2, "you"=>1}