dictionary shared between objects for no reason?

Question

The following code is supposed to create a new (modified) version of a frequency distribution (nltk.FreqDist). Both variables should then be the same length.

It works f

Answer 1

class WebText:
    freq_dist_weighted = {}

declares freq_dist_weighted so that it is shared between all objects of type WebText; essentially, this is like a static member in C++.

If you want each WebText object to have its own freq_dist_weighted member (i.e. you can change it for one instance without changing it for another instance), you want to define it in __init__:

class WebText:
    def __init__(self):
        self.freq_dist_weighted = {}