String To Dictionary Word Count

So I'm having trouble with a homework question. Write a function word_counter(input_str) which takes a string input_str and returns a dictionary mapping words in input_str to th

Solution 1:

It looks like you found the error in the original code, so you may be all taken care of.

That said, you can tighten-up the code by using collections.Counter(). The example for it in the docs closely matches your assignment:

>>> # Find the ten most common words in Hamlet>>> import re
>>> words = re.findall(r'\w+', open('hamlet.txt').read().lower())
>>> Counter(words).most_common(10)
[('the', 1143), ('and', 966), ('to', 762), ('of', 669), ('i', 631),
 ('you', 554),  ('a', 546), ('my', 514), ('hamlet', 471), ('in', 451)]

Solution 2:

Figured out what I was doing wrong. Just remove the last 2 lines of code and return the counts dictionary. The test code does the rest :)