Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

Python

Posted by Minseok Kim
Minseok Kim
2,708 Points

how to do the challenge?

def word_count(string):
    string = string.lower().split()
    dictionary = {}
    for a in string:
        dictionary[a] = string.count(a)
    return dictionary

What's wrong? I see people doing += 1, but I don't know how that would work either..

Steve Hunter
Steve Hunter
57,712 Points

Have you got a link to the challenge, please?

Minseok Kim
Minseok Kim
2,708 Points

LINK: https://teamtreehouse.com/library/python-collections-2/dictionaries/word-count

Tanja Riet
Tanja Riet
10,803 Points 
# my solution: create an empty dictionary and fill it 
[MOD: we don't provide unexplained solutions; sorry - srh]

2 Answers

Øyvind Andreassen
Øyvind Andreassen
16,839 Points
Øyvind Andreassen
Øyvind Andreassen
16,839 Points

Hey,

Looking at your solution it actually works. More elegant than the solution that I came up with! It also passes the challenge when I try it, so I would try it again and look out for pesky whitespaces that will mess up your indentation. If tabs isn't working try doing manual four spaces for each indentation level.

If it still doesn't pass this is my solution. That also passes.

def word_count(string):
    dictionary = {}
    word_list = string.lower().split()
    for word in word_list:
        if word in dictionary:
            dictionary[word] += 1
        else:
            dictionary[word] = 1
    return dictionary

Simple loop through each word in the list and counts how many times it comes up.

Jeff Muday
MOD
Jeff Muday
Treehouse Moderator 28,716 Points
Jeff Muday
Jeff Muday
Treehouse Moderator 28,716 Points

Your approach is pretty good. The cool thing about Python and... well almost any other language is there are MANY ways to do things. I show you three different ways to solve it below.

A big issue is that if you attempt to access a dictionary key that DOES NOT exist, Python will throw an error. So you have three workarounds (I am sure there are other good ways to do this too!)

This is the simplest approach-- the GET method on the dictionary object

def word_count(string):
    string = string.lower().split()
    dictionary = {}
    for a in string:
        dictionary[a] = dictionary.get(a,0) + 1
    return dictionary

Using dictionary with key/values that have been "pre-zeroed". The extra loop makes this slightly slower.

def word_count(string):
    string = string.lower().split()
    dictionary = {}
    for a in string:
        dictionary[a] = 0
    for a in string:
        dictionary[a] += 1
    return dictionary

Using the TRY/EXCEPT block (try/except is a little slow)

def word_count(string):
    string = string.lower().split()
    dictionary = {}
    for a in string:
        try:
            dictionary[a] += 1
        except:
             dictionary[a] = 1
    return dictionary