Counting Words in a List with Python

Learn how to use Python to count the number of words in a list, including step-by-step explanations and code snippets. …

Learn how to use Python to count the number of words in a list, including step-by-step explanations and code snippets.

Definition

Counting words in a list is a fundamental task in programming that involves taking a collection of words as input and returning the total number of unique or duplicate words. In this article, we will explore how to count the words in a list using Python.

Step-by-Step Explanation

To count the words in a list with Python, you can follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Importing the Required Modules

The first step is to import the required modules. For this task, we will use the split() method and the len() function, which are built-in Python functions.

import re

However, since split() can handle our needs, we won’t need any additional imports. The regular expression module isn’t actually necessary for this simple task but is included here as it might be useful in a real-world scenario where more complex string manipulation is required.

Step 2: Creating the List of Words

The next step is to create a list of words that you want to count. For example, let’s say we have the following sentence:

sentence = "Hello world this is a test"

To split the sentence into individual words, you can use the split() method without any arguments, which splits at whitespace characters by default.

Step 3: Counting the Words

Now that we have our list of words, counting them is quite straightforward. We simply need to get the length of the list using the len() function.

words = sentence.split()
word_count = len(words)

The split() method returns a list of strings where each string is a word from the original sentence. The len() function then returns the number of elements in this list, which gives us the count of words.

Step 4: Displaying the Result

Finally, we can display the result by printing it out:

print("The total number of words:", word_count)

This will output something like:

The total number of words: 6

Putting It All Together

Here’s the complete code snippet that combines all the steps:

sentence = "Hello world this is a test"
words = sentence.split()
word_count = len(words)
print("The total number of words:", word_count)

This will give us the correct count of words in the input sentence.