Question

I’m trying to select the most frequently occurring key words on a table.
I need to search for the number of occurrences of a word in a list that DOES NOT include a given second, third, fourth, etc. word.

For example, I need to search for the number of times the word “lollypop” appears in a list that does not include the word “candy”.

This code will return the number of times the word “lollypop” appears:

rt = Parallelize@
 Cases[MemoizeTable["Candy_table.txt"], 
  x_List /; 
   MemberQ[x, 
    s_String /; 
     StringMatchQ[s, ("*lollypop*"), IgnoreCase -> True]], {1}];

I tried adding StringFreeQ to exclude “candy”, and I tried adding Nor where one would add Or in the string search, but I wasn’t sure how to do that/where to put it/them..?

I need a "this" BUT NOT "that" code, basically.

Answer 1

excludeList = {"candy", "other"};
toCount = "lollypop";

numberOfToCount[list_, tocount_, excludeList_] := 
  If[And @@ ((! MemberQ[list, #]) & /@ excludeList), 
     Count[list, tocount], 
     "Excluded"];

Usage:

numberOfToCount[{"lollypop", "lollypop", "the beatles"}, toCount, excludeList]
numberOfToCount[{"lollypop", "lollypop", "candy"}, toCount, excludeList]

(*
-> 2
-> Excluded
*)