WordCount

In this assignment you will use your knowledge of Python basic strings, arithmetic, file reading, and dicts to create a command line utility to count the words in a text file (small.txt and alice.txt).

Complete the command-line python program named wordcount.py so that it will count the number of words in a text file, and also handle optional flags named --count and --topcount. The assignment instructions are also found within the wordcount.py file in this repo.

Example

$ python wordcount.py --count alice.txt
"'tis : 1
"--said : 1
"come : 2
"coming : 1
"edwin : 1
"french, : 1
"he's : 1
"how : 2
"i : 8
"i'll : 2
"it" : 2
"keep : 1
"let : 1
"much : 1
"poison" : 1
"purpose"?' : 1

$ python wordcount.py --topcount alice.txt
Top 20 most frequent words in alice.txt
the : 1605
and : 766
to : 706
a : 614
she : 518
of : 493
said : 421
it : 362
in : 352
was : 333
you : 265
i : 261
as : 249
that : 222
alice : 221
her : 208
at : 206
had : 176
with : 169
all : 155

Part A

For the --count flag, implement a print_words(filename) function that counts how often each word appears in the text and prints:

word1 : count1
word2 : count2
...

Print the above list in order, sorted alphabetically by word (Python will sort punctuation to come before letters which is fine). Store all the words as lowercase, so 'The' and 'the' count as the same word.

Part B

For the --topcount flag, implement a print_top() function which is similar to print_words() but which prints just the top 20 most common words sorted so the most common word is first, then the next most common, and so on.

Debugging

Use your VSCode IDE to set up a debug session, and single-step your wordcount.py -- Create two debug launch.json configurations: One with optional --count argument and one with --topcount argument.

PR (Pull Request) Workflow for this Assignment