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Home Interviews Count Word Frequency in a String with explanation – MindStick
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1 Answers

ICSM Computer
ICSM Computer 03 Sep 2025
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Problem:

You are given a string, and you want to know how many times each word appears in it.
Example:

"This is a test. This test is simple."

Expected output (word frequency):

this → 2  
is → 2  
a → 1  
test → 2  
simple → 1

Step-by-Step Solution

1. Take the input string

text = "This is a test. This test is simple."

2. Normalize the string

  • Convert everything to lowercase → to avoid treating "This" and "this" as different words.
  • Remove punctuation (., ,, etc.).
import re

# Lowercase and remove non-alphabetic characters
cleaned_text = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z\s]', '', text.lower())

Now:

cleaned_text = "this is a test this test is simple"

3. Split the string into words

words = cleaned_text.split()

Now:

words = ['this', 'is', 'a', 'test', 'this', 'test', 'is', 'simple']

4. Count word frequency

We can use:

  • Dictionary (manual counting)
  • collections.Counter (built-in shortcut)

Method 1: Using Dictionary

word_freq = {}
for word in words:
    word_freq[word] = word_freq.get(word, 0) + 1

Method 2: Using Counter

from collections import Counter
word_freq = Counter(words)

5. Display the result

for word, freq in word_freq.items():
    print(f"{word} → {freq}")

Full Working Code

import re
from collections import Counter

text = "This is a test. This test is simple."

# Step 1: Clean and normalize
cleaned_text = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z\s]', '', text.lower())

# Step 2: Split into words
words = cleaned_text.split()

# Step 3: Count frequency
word_freq = Counter(words)

# Step 4: Print results
for word, freq in word_freq.items():
    print(f"{word} → {freq}")

Output

this → 2
is → 2
a → 1
test → 2
simple → 1

Explanation Summary:

  • Normalize the string (lowercase + remove punctuation).
  • Split the string into words.
  • Count how many times each word occurs.
  • Print or return the result.
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