Word frequency analyzer

Mira Hello. I've been tasked with pulling insights from the mission logs and there are hundreds of them. I need something that takes a text file, counts how often each word appears, and shows me the top results. I want to find out what topics keep coming up without reading everything manually.

What you're building

Enter text, or a filename to read from: sample.txt

Top 10 words:
  the       42
  and       31
  python    18
  is        16
  you       14
  ...

What you'll need

• Strings — splitting text into words, stripping punctuation, lowercasing
• Dictionaries — counting how many times each word appears
• Lists — sorting and slicing the top results
• Files and exceptions — reading from a text file
• Lambda, comprehensions, and zip — list comprehensions and sorted() with a key work well here

Hints

Normalise before counting. Lowercase everything and strip punctuation before building your count. Otherwise "Python" and "python" and "Python," all count as different words.

A dictionary does the counting. Loop through the words. If the word is already a key, increment its count. If it isn't, add it with a count of 1. .get() with a default value makes this neat.

Sorting a dictionary by value. sorted() accepts a key= argument. Pass a lambda that returns the value for each key to sort by frequency.

Going further

Once the core analysis works:

• Stop words. Ignore common words like "the", "and", "is". Define a set of stop words and skip any word that appears in it.
• Configurable top N. Let the user specify how many results to show instead of always showing 10.
• Visual output. Print each word with a bar made of repeated characters proportional to its count. Even a simple version makes the output much more readable.