How to find the frequency of a word in a text file using python? But user should give the input word

Question

My aim: To count the frequency of a user entered word in a text file.(in python) I tried this.But it gives the frequency of all the words in the file.How can i modify it to give the frequency of a word entered by the user?

from collections import Counter
word=input("Enter a word:")
def word_count(test6):
        with open('test6.txt') as f:
                return Counter(f.read().split())

print("Number of input words in the file :",word_count(word))

This may be a naive question but I am just beginning to code.So please try to answer. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

to find the frequency of a word in a file you can just join all the lines from your file using str.join and then just use str.count :

def word_count(word):
    with open('test6.txt') as f:
            return ''.join(f).count(word)


print("Number of words in the file :", word_count(input('give me a word')))

also you may use for word count in the text:

def word_count(word):
        with open('test6.txt') as f:
                return f.read().count(word)

Answer 2

While str.count works nice if you only look up one word, the approach with Counter is better when you want to get multiple word-counts and have a bigger text to search through (say a whole book, some megabyte of data).

In that case you can read your book once into a Counter and query it multiple times. You need to clean up data though, fe newlines and punctation have to be removed so you find 'so' inside 'Is that so?' :

import string
from collections import Counter
# fixed text, normally you read your file here
text = """This text has punctation
as well as newlines. No -word- will
be unaccounted for. This text should do
as test text for now. no no no"""

# make a translation to remove punctuation and newlines from the text
# before splitting it into words that you then count once
punct = string.punctuation
p = str.maketrans(punct + "\n\r", ' '*(len(punct)+2))

wc = Counter(text.translate(p).split())

# repeatedly ask your counter how often the word occured
while True:
    word=input("Enter a word: ") 
    if not word.strip():
        break 
    print(f"'{word}' occures {wc.get(word,0)} times.") 

Output:

Enter a word: text
'text' occures 3 times.
Enter a word: has
'has' occures 1 times.
Enter a word: do
'do' occures 1 times.
Enter a word: no
'no' occures 3 times.
Enter a word: 

If you can do regex, you could also extract words by regex, more here: Extracting words from a string, removing punctuation and returning a list with separated words