Charting letter frequency
Our first step is to analyze the SOWPODS word list used in this challenge. If you read the Wikipedia entry, you will notice that there is a word distribution by number of letters. This is important to note if you are a tournament player or just completing this challenge.Below is a program that will recreate this list, although in a slightly different manner. Read through the code and see if you can explain what each part does. Try to determine why we care about the length of the words,
stats.py
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: ascii -*-
"""
Sowpods stats
- counts the words on the list
- finds the longest word
- breakdown of word length
ToDo
- Help
- Error handling
"""
from __future__ import print_function
import string
import sys
class LenCounter:
def __init__(self):
self.dict = {}
def add(self, item):
count = self.dict.get(item, 0)
self.dict[item] = count + 1
def counts(self, desc=None):
"""Returns a list of keys sorted by values.
Pass desc as 1 if you want a descending sort. """
result = map(None, self.dict.values(), self.dict.keys())
result.sort()
if desc: result.reverse()
return result
def get_stats():
input_file = sys.argv[1]
word_count = 0
longest_length = 0
lc = LenCounter()
f = open(input_file, 'r')
for line in f:
word_count += 1
lc.add(len(line.strip()))
if len(line.strip()) > longest_length:
longest_length = len(line.strip())
print("Word Count: ", word_count)
print("Longest Word Length: ", longest_length)
for item in lc.counts():
print(item)
f.close()
def print_help():
""" Help Docstring"""
pass
def test():
""" Testing Docstring"""
pass
if __name__=='__main__':
# test()
get_stats()
The Results
Word Count: 267751
Longest Word Length: 15
(124, 2)
(1292, 3)
(5454, 4)
(5757, 15)
(9116, 14)
(12478, 5)
(13857, 13)
(20297, 12)
(22157, 6)
(27893, 11)
(32909, 7)
(35529, 10)
(40161, 8)
(40727, 9)
