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Python Python Collections (2016, retired 2019) Dictionaries Word Count

Posted by waelitox
waelitox
2,574 Points

Could you please help identifying the mistake I am making in my code to solve this challenge. I fail to find out.

I keep getting this message in this challenge and I am unable to solve it successfully: Bummer: Hmm, didn't get the expected output. Be sure you're lower casing the string and splitting on all white-space!

wordcount.py 
# E.g. word_count("I do not like it Sam I Am") gets back a dictionary like:
# {'i': 2, 'do': 1, 'it': 1, 'sam': 1, 'like': 1, 'not': 1, 'am': 1}
# Lowercase the string to make it easier.
def word_count(sentence):
    dictionary = {}
    sentence.lower()
    for word in sentence.split():
        dictionary.update({word.lower(): sentence.count(word)})
    return dictionary

2 Answers

Fergus Clare
Fergus Clare
12,120 Points
Fergus Clare
Fergus Clare
12,120 Points

Wael Nassief : great question! Are you sure that the interpreter is expecting a .lower() response? Is it possible that by lower casing everything you're causing the interpreter to fail? Lowering cases is helpful, but not always necessary. Consider the following code:

def word_count(sentence):
   dictionary = {}
   for word in sentence.split():
      dictionary.update({word: sentence.count(word)})
   return dictionary

#returns this for your sentence string: {'I': 2, 'do': 1, 'not': 1, 'like': 1, 'it': 1, 'Sam': 1, 'Am': 1}
waelitox
waelitox
2,574 Points

Does not change much, unfortunately.

Dave StSomeWhere
Dave StSomeWhere
19,870 Points
Dave StSomeWhere
Dave StSomeWhere
19,870 Points

You mistake is how you are using lower() and split(). 

#  this line doesn't do anything
sentence.lower()

Try testing with below:

print(word_count("I do not like it Sam I Am i I IT it sam SAM"))

#  your code returns:
{'i': 4, 'do': 1, 'not': 1, 'like': 1, 'it': 2, 'sam': 1, 'am': 1}

# is should be:
{'i': 4, 'do': 1, 'not': 1, 'like': 1, 'it': 3, 'sam': 3, 'am': 1}

Does that get you rolling - or do you need anything additional

waelitox
waelitox
2,574 Points

Thanks! So your hint helped identify the problem. The solution relies on a piece of information I was missing, which is the return value of the method "count". It returns a List ... not a string. Hence, I did the following and now it works fine!

def word_count(sentence): dictionary = {} sentence = sentence.lower() list_of_sentence = sentence.split() for word in list_of_sentence: dictionary.update({word: list_of_sentence.count(word)}) return dictionary