Python: Creating a function to write .CSV files

Question

I want to save word frequency lists as .CSV for several corpora. Is there a way to make Python write the filenames automatically based on the variable name? (eg: corpus_a > corpus_a_typefrequency.csv)

I have the following code, which already works for individual corpora:

from collections import Counter
import csv
counts = Counter(corpus_a)
    
counts = dict(sorted(counts.items(), key=lambda item: item[1],reverse=True))

with open('corpus_a_typefrequency.csv', 'w') as csv_file:  
    writer = csv.writer(csv_file)
    for key, value in counts.items():
       writer.writerow([key, value])

PS: it would be great if I could count only words (no punctuation) and also in a case-insensitive way. I haven't figured out how to do that here yet. I'm using data from the Brown Corpus as following:

import nltk
from nltk.corpus import brown
corpus_a = brown.words()

I tried brown.words().lower().isalpha() , but that doesn't work.

Answer 1

You should have a look at this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/40536047/5289234 . It will allow you to extract the variable name and use it to save the csv.

import inspect


def retrieve_name(var):
        """
        Gets the name of var. Does it from the out most frame inner-wards.
        :param var: variable to get name from.
        :return: string
        """
        for fi in reversed(inspect.stack()):
            names = [var_name for var_name, var_val in fi.frame.f_locals.items() if var_val is var]
            if len(names) > 0:
                return names[0]

from collections import Counter
import csv
counts = Counter(corpus_a)
    
counts = dict(sorted(counts.items(), key=lambda item: item[1],reverse=True))

with open(retrieve_name(corpus_a) +'_typefrequency.csv', 'w') as csv_file:  
    writer = csv.writer(csv_file)
    for key, value in counts.items():
    writer.writerow([key, value])