Practice: Word Count

Lesson

Practice: Word Count

This exercise combines lower, split, a loop, and a counter.

Exercise

Define a function named count_word with two parameters: text and word.
It returns how many times word appears in text as a whole word, ignoring case.

count_word("The cat saw the other cat", "cat") returns 2. count_word("The cat", "THE") returns 1.

Whole word means "cat" does not match inside "concatenate" — splitting the text into words before comparing handles this.

Run your code to see the output, then press Submit.

Hints

Lowercase both text and word before comparing.
Split the text into a word list, then count matches with an accumulator.

Tests

import unittest


class TestCountWord(unittest.TestCase):
    def test_two_matches(self):
        self.assertEqual(count_word("The cat saw the other cat", "cat"), 2)

    def test_case_is_ignored(self):
        self.assertEqual(count_word("The cat", "THE"), 1)

    def test_substrings_do_not_count(self):
        self.assertEqual(count_word("concatenate the strings", "cat"), 0)

    def test_no_match_gives_zero(self):
        self.assertEqual(count_word("nothing here", "cat"), 0)

Solution

def count_word(text, word):
    target = word.lower()
    count = 0
    for candidate in text.lower().split():
        if candidate == target:
            count += 1
    return count


print(count_word("The cat saw the other cat", "cat"))

Solution hidden. Give it a real try first.

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main.py

Console

Press Run to execute your code, or Submit to test and complete this problem.