How do I fix this program so I can count the number of letters and how do I count words?

Question

import collections as c
text = input('Enter text')
print(len(text))
a = len(text)
counts = c.Counter(a)
print(counts)
spaces = counts(' ')
print(specific)
print(a-spaces)
#I want to count the number of letters so I want the amount of characters - the amount of             
#spaces.

You might want to store the `len(text)` first then use the variable. — stmfunk, Mar 23 '14 at 12:57
See this related question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17507876/trying-to-count-words-in-a-string-python — Anderson Green, Mar 23 '14 at 13:44

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 23 '14 at 13:01

You should pass the string directly to the constructor of Counter

cc = c.Counter( "this is a test" )
cc[" "] # will be 3

To do words, just split on spaces (or maybe periods too_

cc = c.Counter( "this is a test test".split( " " ) )
cc[ "test" ] # will be 2

Roberto · Answer 2 · 2014-03-23T13:08:34.903

To count characters, you can use regular expressions to remove any non-alphanumeric character, i.e.:

import re
print(re.sub("[\W]", "", text))

You can use the re module to count words too, by counting the non-empty strings you get from splitting the string at non-alphanumeric characters:

print([word for word in re.split("[\W]", text) if len(word) > 0])

If you want to strip numbers too, just use [\W\d] instead of [\W].

You can find more on regular expressions here.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 23 '14 at 13:35

Don't go over your head with this one and use a good old list comprehension:

text = raw_input('Enter text') #or input(...) if you're using python 3.X
number_of_non_spaces = len([i for i in text if i != " "])
number_of_spaces = len(text) - number_of_non_spaces

How do I fix this program so I can count the number of letters and how do I count words?

3 Answers3