Count the number of times a word is repeated in a text file

Question

I need to write a program that prompts for the name of a text file and prints the words with the maximum and minimum frequency, along with their frequency (separated by a space).

This is my text

I am Sam
Sam I am
That Sam-I-am
That Sam-I-am
I do not like
that Sam-I-am
Do you like
green eggs and ham
I do not like them
Sam-I-am
I do not like
green eggs and ham

Code:

file = open(fname,'r')
dict1 = []
for line in file:
  line = line.lower()
  x = line.split(' ')
  if x in dict1:
    dict1[x] += 1 
  else:
    dict1[x] = 1 

Then I wanted to iterate over the keys and values and find out which one was the max and min frequency however up to that point my console says

TypeError: list indices must be integers or slices, not list

I don't know what that means either.

For this problem the expected result is:

Max frequency: i 5
Min frequency: you 1

Answer 1

you are using a list instead of a dictionary to store the word frequencies. You can't use a list to store key-value pairs like this, you need to use a dictionary instead. Here is how you could modify your code to use a dictionary to store the word frequencies:

file = open(fname,'r')
word_frequencies = {} # use a dictionary to store the word frequencies

for line in file:
    line = line.lower()
    words = line.split(' ')
    for word in words:
        if word in word_frequencies:
            word_frequencies[word] += 1
        else:
            word_frequencies[word] = 1

Then to iterate over the keys and find the min and max frequency

# iterate over the keys and values in the word_frequencies dictionary
# and find the word with the max and min frequency
max_word = None
min_word = None
max_frequency = 0
min_frequency = float('inf')

for word, frequency in word_frequencies.items():
    if frequency > max_frequency:
        max_word = word
        max_frequency = frequency
    if frequency < min_frequency:
        min_word = word
        min_frequency = frequency

Print the results

print("Max frequency:", max_word, max_frequency)
print("Min frequency:", min_word, min_frequency)