Question

I’m using minidom to parse through an xml document. I took the data with yum tags and stored them in a list and calculated the frequency of the words. However, its not storing or reading them as strings in the list. Is there another way to do it? Right now this is what I have:

yumNodes = [node for node in doc.getElementsByTagName("yum")]

for node in yumNodes:
    yumlist.append(t.data for t in node.childNodes if t.nodeType == t.TEXT_NODE)

for ob in yumlist:
    for o in ob:
        if word not in freqDict:
            freqDict[word] = 1
        else:
            freqDict[word] += 1

Answer 1

Not directly related to your question, but as a remark that could improve your code…the pattern

freqDict = {}
...
if word not in freqDict:
    freqDict[word] = 1
else:
    freqDict[word] += 1

is usually replaced with

import collections
freqDict = collections.defaultdict(int)
...
freqDict[word] += 1

or pre-2.5

freqDict = {}
...
freqDict.setdefault(word, 0) += 1