Newbie: word count and Win32

[Bengt Richter]

On 19 Mar 2002 04:21:10 -0800, jchristl at zdnetmail.com (Joe Christl) wrote:

>newbie here (don't you just cringe when you read that? :),
>
>I downloaded the python EXE from
>http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.2/, found a script on the
>mail.python.org Tutor page:
>http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/2001-February/003403.html
 ^...[1]
>
>but I can't seem to get it to run.  I would like it to run from the
>C:\ command prompt, like so:
>
>c:\count.py foo.txt   (or)
>c:\count.pyc foo.txt
>
>and have it output the lines, words, and characters.  I have tried to
>even get it working from the >>> prompt, to no avail.
>
>Am I doing something wrong here?
>
>From a quick look that[1] script, it looks like it expects to read
from stdin only. I.e., it says

    # iterate over each line on stdin
    for line in sys.stdin.readlines() :
        ...

To feed the script's stdin you'll have to redirect or pipe data to it.
To pipe stuff on windows to a python script you have to run the interpreter
(python) explicitly one way or another, so I would try:

    python count.py < foo.txt

or you could pipe the output of the windows type command, like:

    type foo.txt | python count.py

To make the script work like what you expected, it needs to look
at the command line arguments (sys.argv) for a file name and open that,
and use the resulting file object in place of stdin.

BTW, IMO you get a nicer ouput if you change the last line of the script to
     print '%6d: %s' % (words[word], word)

As an exercise, you could modify it to accept an option on the command line
to output in order of frequency instead of alphbetically, and also accept
a file name. Then look into the glob module and see if you can make it
do multiple files from a wild card spec. Have fun.

You may want to look at various scripts that were put on your disk when
you installed, e.g. in wahtever corresponds to D:\Python22\Tools\Scripts\*
on your system. Look at some small stuff first.

Regards,
Bengt Richter