Optimizing a text statistics function

[Benji York]

Nickolay Kolev <nmkolev at uni-bonn.de> wrote in message news:<c661pe$tie$1 at f1node01.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>...
> I find the two loops through the initial list a bit troubling. Could 
> this be avoided?

How about instead of:

for x in strippedWords:
    unique[x] = 0

for x in strippedWords:
    unique[x] += 1

You do something like (untested):

for word in strippedWords:
    unique[word] = unique.get(word, 0) + 1

--
Benji York
http://benjiyork.com