letter frequency counter / your thoughts..

[Paul Melis]

umpsumps at gmail.com wrote:
> Here is my code for a letter frequency counter.  It seems bloated to
> me and any suggestions of what would be a better way (keep in my mind
> I'm a beginner) would be greatly appreciated..

Not bad for a beginner I think :)

> def valsort(x):
> 	res = []
> 	for key, value in x.items():
> 		res.append((value, key))
> 	return res
> 
> def mostfreq(strng):
> 	dic = {}
> 	for letter in strng:
> 		if letter not in dic:
> 			dic.setdefault(letter, 1)
> 		else:
> 			dic[letter] += 1
> 	newd = dic.items()
> 	getvals = valsort(newd)
> 	getvals.sort()
> 	length = len(getvals)
> 	return getvals[length - 3 : length]
> 
> thanks much!!

Slightly shorter:

def mostfreq(strng):
     dic = {}
     for letter in strng:
         if letter not in dic:
             dic[letter] = 0
         dic[letter] += 1
     # Swap letter, count here as we want to sort on count first
     getvals = [(pair[1],pair[0]) for pair in dic.iteritems()]
     getvals.sort()
     return getvals[-3:]

I'm not sure if  you wanted the function mostfreq to return the 3 most 
frequent letters of the first 3 letters? It seems to do the latter. The 
code above uses the former, i.e. letters with highest frequency.

Paul