6 ms·

for word, count in Counter(open('test.txt').read().lower().split()).most_common(): print word, count

• Goladus 13y ago
  I like this one. Though I would do it like this to keep the lines under 80 characters: words=open('test.txt').read().lower().split() for word, count in Counter(words).most_common(): print word, count (edited per child comment)
  • benhoyt 13y ago
    Yeah, those are nice -- and may actually be more efficient on smaller files, as you're only doing the lower() once on a big string. However, for big files you don't necessarily want to read the whole thing in at once. One nitpick: it's Pythonic (I think) to just name the list of words "words" rather than "word_list".
    • Goladus 13y ago
      Yes that's a classic tradeoff, a proficient programmer will have to pick one. Personally I always read entire files into memory first unless I have reason to believe memory will be an issue or need to program defensively against malicious/careless input. The code is always much cleaner and easier to read and if you need to do a second pass on the data you don't need to re-read it from disk.