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