Lists
Now, we have been able to iterate through a string, but so far we have only had the ability to go through each letter. Lets say for example that you are trying to iterate through each word in a string, rather than each letter. Using python this is simple using the string.split(' ') method!
To begin, we can split a string apart based on any character we want. This means we can split of spaces (' ') or commas (',') or any other character that we are using.
When you use the .split() method, it will return a list:
string = 'Hello World! We are learning about strings in Python'
string_list = string.split(' ')
This returns:
['Hello','World!','We','are','learning','about','strings','in','Python']
Now we can iterate through each word in the list! This means that we could count the number of words rather than letters in a document.
string = 'Hello World! We are learning about strings in Python'
# Create a list of our words
string_list = string.split(' ')
# Initialize the dictionary to count the letters
word_counter = {}
# Iterate through all the letters
for word in string_list:
# Conditional if we haven't seen the letter before
if word not in word_counter:
word_counter[word] = 1
# Conditional if we have already seen the letter before
else:
word_counter[word] += 1
print(word_counter)
This prints out:
{'Hello': 1, 'World!': 1, 'We': 1, 'are': 1, 'learning': 1, 'about': 1, 'strings': 1, 'in': 1, 'Python': 1}
And now you know how to build a word counter in python!
