41 — Text stats: letters and words

A story is a string first, then a list of words. This guide reads a text file, counts its characters and words, and lets Python find the longest and most common ones.

#Steps

1. Create story.txt next to your program and read it back:

   the sun rose over the quiet town
   the town woke and the birds sang
   the children ran to the playground
   

   copyrun it →

   use file latest
   text = file_read("story.txt")
   words = text.split()
   show f"characters: {len(text)}"
   show f"words: {len(words)}"
   

   copyrun it →

   It prints characters: 101 and words: 20. file_read (guide 13) returns the text; .split() cuts the word list.

2. Longest and most common word. max(words, key=len) compares by length and collections.Counter (guide 24) counts every word, with most_common(1) for the top pair:

   use file latest
   from collections import Counter
   text = file_read("story.txt")
   words = text.split()
   longest = max(words, key=len)
   counts = Counter(words)
   show f"longest word: {longest}"
   show counts.most_common(1)
   

   copyrun it →

   It prints longest word: playground and [('the', 6)].

3. Now the whole report in one file. Save text-stats.nme and run it:

   # text-stats.nme — letters and words in a text file.
   # Run: nme r text-stats
   # The file story.txt must exist in the same folder.
   
   use file latest
   from collections import Counter
   
   # Read the whole file as one string.
   text = file_read("story.txt")
   show f"characters: {len(text)}"
   
   # Split into a list of words.
   words = text.split()
   show f"words: {len(words)}"
   
   # Longest word, compared by length.
   longest = max(words, key=len)
   show f"longest word: {longest} ({len(longest)} letters)"
   
   # Most common word and its count.
   counts = Counter(words)
   top_word, top_times = counts.most_common(1)[0]
   show f"most common word: {top_word} ({top_times} times)"
   
   # Average word length, written out long-hand.
   total = 0
   for word in words:
       total = total + len(word)
   show f"average word length: {total / len(words)}"
   

   copyrun it →

   most_common(1)[0] pulls the only pair out of the one-element list; the last loop adds every word's length.

   nme r text-stats
   

   copy

   characters: 101
   words: 20
   longest word: playground (10 letters)
   most common word: the (6 times)
   average word length: 4.05
   

   copy

   One file, four questions answered. The Korean guide uses 파일읽기 and 보여줘 with the same Python calls — full pair in 41-text-stats.ko.md.

#Try it yourself

Add a shortest line with min(words, key=len), then count the words longer than four letters with one for loop.

#What you learned

• file_read(path) returns the whole text file as one string.
• len(text) counts characters; text.split() makes a word list.
• max(words, key=len) finds the longest word by comparing lengths.
• Counter(words).most_common(1) returns the most common word and its count.