How can I count the items repeated in a list? Help me please.

Hi Alex,

1) The challenge asks us to create a function named word_count, which takes a string as a parameter. I named my string 'examp_string' for this exercise.

2) Inside of the function, we want to create a variable for an empty dictionary. We'll provide data for this empty dictionary later.

3) Next up, we want to write a for loop that will cycle through each word in our string. We will use the split method on our example string so that our string is evaluated as if it is a list. Our for loop is iterating through this list for each word.

4) Then, we want to write an if statement within the for loop. This if block will increment (add) to the value of each key by 1 if the word has already appeared, or create a new key with an initialized value of 1 if it has not.

5) Finally, we will return the dictionary--which is now populated with each word of our string and how many times each word appears.

def word_count(examp_string):
  string_dict = {}
  for word in examp_string.split():
    if word in string_dict:
        string_dict[word] += 1
    else:
        string_dict[word] = 1
  return string_dict

Hope this helps!