Count word occurrence in a list of strings [closed]

Answer 1

Use a collections.Counter() object and split your words on whitespace. You probably want to lowercase your words as well, and remove punctuation:

from collections import Counter

counts = Counter()

for sentence in sequence_of_sentences:
    counts.update(word.strip('.,?!"\'').lower() for word in sentence.split())

or perhaps use a regular expression that only matches word characters:

from collections import Counter
import re

counts = Counter()
words = re.compile(r'\w+')

for sentence in sequence_of_sentences:
    counts.update(words.findall(sentence.lower()))

Now you have a counts dictionary with per-word counts.

Demo:

>>> sequence_of_sentences = ['This is a sentence', 'This is another sentence']
>>> from collections import Counter
>>> counts = Counter()
>>> for sentence in sequence_of_sentences:
...     counts.update(word.strip('.,?!"\'').lower() for word in sentence.split())
... 
>>> counts
Counter({'this': 2, 'is': 2, 'sentence': 2, 'a': 1, 'another': 1})
>>> counts['sentence']
2