Count letters in a text file

Question

I am a beginner python programmer and I am trying to make a program which counts the numbers of letters in a text file. Here is what I\'ve got so far:

import         


        

Answer 1

You have to use collections.Counter

from collections import Counter
text = 'aaaaabbbbbccccc'
c = Counter(text)
print c

It prints:

Counter({'a': 5, 'c': 5, 'b': 5})

Your text variable should be:

import string
text = open('text.txt').read()
# Filter all characters that are not letters.
text = filter(lambda x: x in string.letters, text.lower())

For getting the output you need:

for letter, repetitions in c.iteritems():
    print letter, repetitions

In my example it prints:

a 5
c 5
b 5

For more information Counters doc