Question

I made a program:

import collections
x = input("Enter in text: ")
x_counter = collections.Counter()
x_counter.update(x)
print("Your sequence contains:\n")
for i in '`1234567890-=qwertyuiop[]\asdfghjkl;zxcvbnm,./~!@#$%^&*()_+QWERTYUIOP\
{}|ASDFGHJKL:"ZXCVBNM<>?':
    print(i, x_counter[i])

That prints out the number of times a letter has been used in a text.
When the user enters in a smaller sized text, like a paragraph for example…the program runs fine. When the user enters a very long text, say 5 paragraphs…the program quits and runs all of the input as bash commands…Why is this???

Answer 1

That’s because input only gets a single line from the user, as per the following example:

pax> cat qq.py
x = raw_input ("blah: ") # using raw_input for Python 2
print x

pax> python qq.py
blah: hello<ENTER>
hello

pax> there<ENTER>
bash: there: command not found

pax> 

One possibility is to read the information from a file rather than using input, but you can also do something like:

def getline():
    try:
        x = raw_input ("Enter text (or eof): ")
    except EOFError:
        return ""
    return x + "\n"

text = ""
line = getline()
while line != "":
    text = text + line;
    line = getline()
print "\n===\n" + text

which will continue to read input from the user until they end the input with EOF (CTRL-D under Linux):

pax> python qq.py
Enter text (or eof): Hello there,
Enter text (or eof): 
Enter text (or eof): my name is Pax.
Enter text (or eof): <CTRL-D>
===
Hello there,

my name is Pax.