Python 2.7 word counter

Asked Sep 18 '15 at 20:37

Active Sep 18 '15 at 20:37

Viewed 29 times

I'm trying to create a program in python that counts the number of words of a sentence inputted by a user by adding the number of spaces and full stops. The code I have written is:

sentence = raw_input('Enter your sentence')
word = 0

for i in sentence:
    if i == ' ' or '.':
        word += 1

print word

When I run the code it outputs the total number of characters. Can anyone spot my mistake?

asked Sep 18 '15 at 20:37

T. Green

`'w' == ' ' or '.'`. Try it in a command prompt. – Peter Wood Sep 18 '15 at 20:39
`word = len(sentence.split())`. No need for iteration. – David Zemens Sep 18 '15 at 20:48
@DavidZemens Thanks! :) – T. Green Sep 18 '15 at 21:23
incidentially, you could've also done: `if i == ' ' or i == '.'` with your loop, but the loop really isn't necessary here :) – David Zemens Sep 18 '15 at 21:26
@DavidZemens That only counts the whitespace runs, not the amount of `' '` and `'.'` – Peter Wood Sep 19 '15 at 21:58
@PeterWood That's true, but also probably about 99% irrelevant for common usage. OP is attempting to count *words*, and was using spaces and periods as a proxy for word-boundaries, so, the `.` was essentially a false "requirement" for the problem. – David Zemens Sep 20 '15 at 01:06

Python 2.7 word counter

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