Counting word frequency and making a dictionary from it

Question

I want to take every word from a text file, and count the word frequency in a dictionary.

Example: \'this is the textfile, and it is used to take words and co

Answer 1

If you don't want to use collections.Counter, you can write your own function:

import sys

filename = sys.argv[1]
fp = open(filename)
data = fp.read()
words = data.split()
fp.close()

unwanted_chars = ".,-_ (and so on)"
wordfreq = {}
for raw_word in words:
    word = raw_word.strip(unwanted_chars)
    if word not in wordfreq:
        wordfreq[word] = 0 
    wordfreq[word] += 1

for finer things, look at regular expressions.