Question

My task is to parse a txtfile and return a dictionary with the counts of last names in the file. The txtfile looks like this:

city: Aberdeen
state: Washington
Johnson,    Danny
Williams, Steve
Miller,    Austin
Jones, Davis
Miller,    Thomas
Johnson, Michael

I know how to read the file in, and assign the file to a list or a string, however I have no clue how to go about finding the counts of each and putting them into a dictionary. Could one of you point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

import re

with open('test.txt') as f:
    text = f.read()

reobj = re.compile("(.+),", re.MULTILINE)
dic = {}
for match in reobj.finditer(text):
    surname = match.group()
    if surname in dic:
        dic[surname] += 1
    else:
        dic[surname] = 1

The result is:

{'Williams,': 1, 'Jones,': 1, 'Miller,': 2, 'Johnson,': 2}