How best to histogram words?

I want to count the occurrence of specific words. In the past I’ve
used a hash as shown below. Is there a better way? I don’t know which
words will occur, otherwise I’d just preinitialize the hash to all
zeros.

Thanks, Andrew

foo = Hash.new
bar = Hash.new
while l = gets
l.split.each { |w|
# option 1: try to increment cell, catch error
begin
foo[w] += 1
rescue NameError
foo[w] = 1
end

# option 2: initialize on first use
bar[w] = 0 if !bar[w]
bar[w] += 1

}
end
puts foo
puts bar

I want to count the occurrence of specific words. In the past I've
used a hash as shown below. Is there a better way? I don't know which
words will occur, otherwise I'd just preinitialize the hash to all
zeros.

try:

wordcnt = Hash.new(0)
while l = gets.split.each do |w|
  wordcnt[w] += 1
end

puts wordcnt

regards,
-joe

andrew queisser wrote:

I want to count the occurrence of specific words. In the past I’ve
used a hash as shown below. Is there a better way? I don’t know which
words will occur, otherwise I’d just preinitialize the hash to all
zeros.

Thanks, Andrew

foo = Hash.new
bar = Hash.new
while l = gets
l.split.each { |w|
# option 1: try to increment cell, catch error
begin
foo[w] += 1
rescue NameError
foo[w] = 1
end

# option 2: initialize on first use
bar[w] = 0 if !bar[w]
bar[w] += 1

Two other approaches to opt 2:

 bar[w] ||= 0
 bar[w] += 1

and

 bar[w] = bar[w].to_i + 1
···

}
end
puts foo
puts bar

andrew_queisser@Hp.com (andrew queisser) writes:

I want to count the occurrence of specific words. In the past I’ve
used a hash as shown below. Is there a better way? I don’t know which
words will occur, otherwise I’d just preinitialize the hash to all
zeros.

# option 1: try to increment cell, catch error
# option 2: initialize on first use

option 3: use Hash’s default value :slight_smile:

counts = Hash.new(0)

ARGF.each {|line| line.scan(/\w+/).each {|w| counts[w] += 1}}

counts.keys.sort.each {|k| printf(“%4d: %s\n”, counts[k], k) }

Cheers

Dave