Question

wordsFreq = {}
words = []
while True:
    inputWord = raw_input()
    if (inputWord != ""):
        words.append(inputWord)
    else:
        break
for word in words:
    wordsFreq[word] = wordsFreq.get(word, 0) + 1

for word,freq in wordsFreq.items():
    print word + " - " + str(freq)

Apparently my words[] and the for loop is redundant but I had no further explanation than that, can anyone explain to me why it is redundant?

Answer 1

You can skip the step of building a list of words and instead directly create the frequency dict as the user is entering words. I’ve used defaultdict to avoid having to check if a word has already been added.

from collections import defaultdict

wordsFreq = defaultdict(int)
while True:
    word = raw_input()
    if not word:
        break
    wordsFreq[word] += 1

If you aren’t allowed to use defaultdict, it could look like this:

wordsFreq = {}
while True:
    word = raw_input()
    if not word:
        break
    wordsFreq[word] = wordFreq.get(word, 0) + 1