read a file and get the top 3 words using a dictionary in python

Question

I made a function to make a dictionary out of the words in a file and the value is the frequency of the word, named read_dictionary. I'm trying to now make another function that prints the top three words of the file by count so it looks like this: "The top three words in fileName are: word : number word : number word : number"

This is what my code is:

 def top_three_by_count(fileName):

  freq_words = sorted(read_dictionary(f), key = read_dictionary(f).get,
   reverse = True)

  top_3 = freq_words[:3]
  print top_3
 print top_three_by_count(f)

Answer 1

You can use collections.Counter .

from collections import Counter
def top_three_by_count(fileName):
      return [i[0] for i in  Counter(read_dictionary(fileName)).most_common(3)]

Actually you don't need the read_dictionary() function at all. The following code snippet do the whole thing for you.

with open('demo.txt','r') as f:
    print Counter([i.strip() for i in f.read().split(' ')]).most_common(3)