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

Posted by Cody Fisher
Cody Fisher
12,309 Points

Why is my code working in my REPL, but not in this challenge?

Attached is my code. This works fine in my REPL. It does the following steps: 1) convert string to all lowercase 2) split string into a list by all spaces so the list contains all words in the string 3) create an empty dictionary to hold the word keys and their count values 4) for each word in the list - if the word is a key in the dictionary then increment its value by 1 - otherwise, the word is not yet in the dictionary so add it as a key and initialize its value to 1 5) return the object containing all of the words and their counts

Is this an issue with the way the code is being tested, or is there a bug in my code that I am not seeing?

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(string):
    string = string.lower()
    word_list = string.split(" ")
    word_counter = {}
    for word in word_list:
        if word in word_counter.keys():
            word_counter[word] += 1
        else:
            word_counter[word] = 1
    return word_counter

1 Answer

Jennifer Nordell
seal-mask
STAFF
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree
Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher
Jennifer Nordell
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree
Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher

Hi there, Cody Fisher! There isn't a bug in the challenge, nor is there necessarily a bug in your code really. Your code will work for any data set that only contains spaces as white space, but it will fail on any code that contains new line characters or tabs as white space. The problem here is a combination of the interpretation of the instructions and your test data. The test data that was given will give you back a sort of "false positive" because it only contains spaces as white space.

This splits on spaces:

.split(" ")

But this splits on all white space (including things like tabs and new line characters):

.split()

Removing the " " as an argument to the split method causes your code to pass with flying colors! Way to go! :sparkles:

Cody Fisher
Cody Fisher
12,309 Points

Thanks! That did the trick. I also saw some people shortening my code to assigning word_list directly like this:

word_list = string.lower().split()