Syntax error when reading a file

Question

The code is meant to take a file as input, change all the letters to lowercase and get rid of any non alphabetical characters. Then it should print out the recurrence of each word in the file.

#!/usr/bin/python 

import sys

def main(argv):
    try:    
        tf = open(sys.argv[1],"r")
    except IOError:
        print("The file ",tf," was not found")
        sys.exit() 
data = tf.read()
data.lower()
data.replace("-"," ")
validLetters = " abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
cleanData = ''.join([i for i in data if i in validLetters])
frequency = {}
words = []
words = cleanData.split()
for x in words:
    if frequency.has_key(x):
        frequency[x] = frequency[x] + 1
    else:
        frequency[x]
print sorted(frequency.values())
tf.close()

this is what I get in the command line:

$ python -m py_compile q1_word_count.py drake.txt
  File "drake.txt", line 1
I Was A Teenage Hacker
    ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

"I Was A Teenage Hacker" is the first line of the text file..

just run it like this python q1_word_count.py drake.txt

Jean-François Fabre
– Jean-François Fabre ♦

2016-11-27 19:47:58 +00:00
Commented Nov 27, 2016 at 19:47 — Jean-François Fabre
– Jean-François Fabre ♦, Commented Nov 27, 2016 at 19:47

Jean-François Fabre · Accepted Answer · 2016-11-27 19:50:14Z

1

Your script is probably all right, but you're running it in an incorrect way.

You're enabling the py_compile module

The py_compile module provides a function to generate a byte-code file from a source file

The module takes all arguments from command line, including your text file, and finds syntax errors in it obviously.

just run it like this:

python q1_word_count.py drake.txt

(you can compile your module first: python -m py_compile q1_word_count.py, in which case you can run the .pyc generated bytecode file, and changing your .py file would need a recompilation everytime for a very tiny speed gain at startup, and none when executing, this is bytecode compilation, not dynamic compilation. If you want dynamic compilation, use pypy)

answered Nov 27, 2016 at 19:50

Jean-François Fabre♦

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