Python - Finding word frequencies of list of words in text file

Question

I am trying to speed up my project to count word frequencies. I have 360+ text files, and I need to get the total number of words and the number of times each word from anot

Answer 1

One possible implementation (using Counter)...

Instead of printing the output, I think it would be simpler to write to a csv file and import that into Excel. Look at http://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html and replace print_summary.

import os
from collections import Counter
import glob

def word_frequency(fileobj, words):
    """Build a Counter of specified words in fileobj"""
    # initialise the counter to 0 for each word
    ct = Counter(dict((w, 0) for w in words))
    file_words = (word for line in fileobj for word in line.split())
    filtered_words = (word for word in file_words if word in words)
    return Counter(filtered_words)


def count_words_in_dir(dirpath, words, action=None):
    """For each .txt file in a dir, count the specified words"""
    for filepath in glob.iglob(os.path.join(dirpath, '*.txt')):
        with open(filepath) as f:
            ct = word_frequency(f, words)
            if action:
                action(filepath, ct)


def print_summary(filepath, ct):
    words = sorted(ct.keys())
    counts = [str(ct[k]) for k in words]
    print('{0}\n{1}\n{2}\n\n'.format(
        filepath,
        ', '.join(words),
        ', '.join(counts)))


words = set(['inflation', 'jobs', 'output'])
count_words_in_dir('./', words, action=print_summary)