Word frequency: Difference between revisions

This is slightly trickier than it appears initially. The task specifically states: "A word is a sequence of one or more contiguous letters", so contractions and hyphenated words are broken up. Initially we might reach for a regex matcher like /\w+/ , but \w includes underscore, which is not a letter but a punctuation connector; and this text is '''full''' of underscores since that is how Project Gutenberg texts denote italicized text. The underscores are not actually parts of the words though, they are markup.

 

 

Actually, in this case /A-Za-z/ returns '''very nearly''' the correct answer. Unfortunately, the name "Alèthe" appears once (only once!) in the text, gets incorrectly split into Al & the, and incorrectly reports 41089 occurrences of "the".