Count the most frequently used words in a text file

Question

I have this programme here that counts how many times a word was used in my .txt file and displays the top 10 most common words. I am hoping to display this information without the numbers as well though, so just the words. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

def countWordFrequency(Data1):
   myDict = {}
   fh = open(Data1, 'r')
   content = fh.read()
   listWords = content.split(" ")
   for w in listWords:
      if (myDict.has_key(w)):
         myDict[w] = myDict[w] + 1
      else:
         myDict[w] = 1
   fh.close()
   return myDict

freq = countWordFrequency('Data1.txt')
topfreq = sorted(freq.iteritems(), key=lambda x:-x[1])[:10]
for x in topfreq:
    print "{0}: {1}".format(*x)

You're welcome: https://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#collections.Counter — jonrsharpe, Jun 20 '14 at 13:40
Use a collection to get the top values of your result (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11902665/top-values-from-dictionary). — Christian Berendt, Jun 20 '14 at 13:46

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 20 '14 at 15:25

How about some list comprehension magic?

f = open('Data1.txt','r')
words = [x for y in [l.split() for l in f.readlines()] for x in y]
print sorted([(w, words.count(w)) for w in set(words)], key = lambda x:x[1], reverse=True)[:10]

I'm sure you could do it in one line if you tried hard enough.

Count the most frequently used words in a text file

1 Answers1