#100DaysOfCode in Python Transcripts
Chapter: Days 4-6: Collections module
Lecture: Counter: don't reinvent the wheel
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0:00
Let's move on with Counter. Let's say we have a text which is split into words, and we want to count the most common words.
0:12
Before I knew about collections, I would write something like this. There you go.
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I had to loop over words, keep a dictionary, see if the key was in the dictionary, if not, initialize to zero. If it's in there do plus one.
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Then I had to loop over the items over the key value pairs, sort them and use lambda to sort by value.
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In reversed order and take a slice to get it to five. Now compare that with using Counter, and its most common method. It's like magic, right?
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One line of code, you pass the words list into the Counter, and you call most common and you give the number
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of top words you want to see and compare that with all the work I had to do here and how easy it gets by using the collections, Counter.