Question

I’m struggling a little understanding how to use classes effectively. I have written a program which I hope to count the number of occurrences of a phrase or word in a .txt file.

I’m not quite sure how to call the function properly, any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

class WordCounter:
    def The_Count(self):  
        print "Counting words..."       
        txt_doc = open("file")

        for line in txt_doc:
            if "word" in txt_doc:
                word_freq = word_freq + 1
                return word_freq

        print "Frequency of word: %s" % word_freq

WordCounter.The_Count

Answer 1

you have several problems here, the code you posted isn’t correct python. class methods should take a reference to self as an argument:

def The_Count(self):

you need to initialize word_freq for the case where there are no words to count:

word_freq = 0

as others have mentioned, you can call your function this way:

counter = WordCounter()
print(counter.The_Count())

It’s not really idiomatic python to wrap these kinds of stateless functions in classes, as you might do in Java or something. I would separate this function into a module, and let the calling class handle the file I/O, etc.