Introductory Programming
Fall 2004
Homework 8
The reading for this assignment is Chapters 10-11 of How to think....
Be unique!
- Start with either your analyze.py from the previous
homework or my ip_hw07_soln.py, which is available on the
class web page. Either way, you should have a program that reads
a file and counts the number of words.
- If you are working with a big file, you will have a hard
time debugging. It's a good idea to start with a smaller dataset,
which you can create with head. In Linux, type
head -100 gatsby.txt > short.txt
Assuming that you have a file named gatsby.txt, this command should copy the first 100 lines and create the file short.txt. Now modify your program to read the shorter file and run it again. - Modify the program to print each list of words after cleaning,
and run it again. Now you have a concrete idea of what data the
program is working with.
- Modify process_file so that it creates a new dictionary
before the loop and prints the dictionary after the loop. Run the
program and confirm that it prints an empty dictionary.
- Inside the loop, add another loop that traverses the list
of words and adds each word to the dictionary. Use the words as
keys and give every key the same value, say 1. Now, when you
run the program, it should print a big dictionary with lots of keys
and values.
- Modify the program so that instead of printing the dictionary,
it prints the length of the dictionary (using len). Run the
program again. What does the output mean?
- Now you have a function that prints one value (the length
of the dictionary) and returns another value (the total number of
words). This is not usually a good idea. It would be more useful
to make it a fruitful function that returns a tuple containing
both values. Modify the program to do that.
- Challenge: Read Section 10.7 and then modify your program so
that it counts the number of times each word appears.
- Double Challenge: Modify the program again so that it finds
the word that appears most often.