In this article, we will be learning different approaches to count the number of times a letter appears in a text file in Python. Below is the content of the text file gfg.txt that we are going to use in the below programs:
Now we will discuss various approaches to get the frequency of a letter in a text file.
Method 1: Using the in-built count() method.
Approach:
- Read the file.
- Store the content of the file in a variable.
- Use the count() method with the argument as a letter whose frequency is required.
- Display the count of the letter.
Implementation:
Python3
# Program to get letter count in a text file# explicit function to return the letter countdef letterFrequency(fileName, letter): # open file in read mode file = open(fileName, 'r') # store content of the file in a variable text = file.read() # using count() return text.count(letter)# call the function and display the letter countprint(letterFrequency('gfg.txt', 'g')) |
Output:
Method 2: Iterate through the file content in order to compare each character with the given letter.
Approach:
- Read the file.
- Store the content of the file in a variable.
- Assign a counter count variable with 0.
- Iterate through each character, if the character is found to be the given letter then increment the counter.
- Display the count of the letter.
Implementation:
Python3
# Program to get letter count in a text file# explicit function to return the letter countdef letterFrequency(fileName, letter): # open file in read mode file = open(fileName, "r") # store content of the file in a variable text = file.read() # declare count variable count = 0 # iterate through each character for char in text: # compare each character with # the given letter if char == letter: count += 1 # return letter count return count# call function and display the letter countprint(letterFrequency('gfg.txt', 'g')) |
Output:
Method 3: Using the lambda function
In this approach, we are using a lambda function to count the number of occurrences of a given letter in a text file. We use the open function to open the file in read mode and read the contents of the file using the read function. Then we use the count function to count the number of occurrences of the given letter in the text. Finally, we return the count value from the lambda function.
Python3
letterFrequency = lambda fileName, letter: open(fileName, 'r').read().count(letter)# call function and display the letter countprint(letterFrequency('gfg.txt', 'g')) |
Output:
