How to Count Repeated Words in a String in Python

In this article, we will learn how to count repeated words in a string. Python provides several methods to Count Repeated Words , such as dictionaries, collections. Counter module, or even regular expressions.

The simplest way to count repeated words is by splitting the string into individual words and using a dictionary to keep track of their occurrences. This method is straightforward and works well for basic word counting tasks.

# Using a dictionary to count words
s = "Geeks for Geeks"
word = s.split()
count = {}
for i in word:
    count[i] = count.get(i, 0) + 1
print(count)

{'Python': 2, 'is': 2, 'great': 1, 'and': 1, 'fun': 1}

Above example splits the string into words using split() and iterates through each word to count their occurrences using a dictionary.

Using collections.Counter

Counter class from collections module provides an efficient way to count words.

from collections import Counter
s = "Geeks for Geeks"
word = s.split()
# Using Counter to count words
count = Counter(word)
print(count)

Counter({'Python': 2, 'is': 2, 'great': 1, 'and': 1, 'fun': 1})

Counter class automatically creates a dictionary where keys are words and values are their counts.

Using Regular Expressions

For more complex text processing such as ignoring punctuation or case, regular expressions can be used. This method extracts words using a pattern and counts them.

import re
from collections import Counter
# Using regular expressions to count words
s = "Python is great. Python is fun!"
# Extract words and convert to lowercase
word = re.findall(r'\b\w+\b', s.lower())  
count = Counter(word)
print(count)

Counter({'python': 2, 'is': 2, 'great': 1, 'fun': 1})

Explanation:

The re.findall() function extracts words from the string while ignoring punctuation. Converting to lowercase ensures that words like "Python" and "python" are treated as the same.