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Building a Tagging Engine in Python using Dictionaries

01/05/2016 By debkr

I started playing around building a Tagging Engine in Python using Lists but now I’ve studied a bit more – particularly Dictionaries – I want to see how I can perfect what I was working on. Here are a couple of key things I added/changed in this program over the version I was working on earlier.

1. Using a dictionary instead of lists for faster counting and simpler recall. This is straight forward, using the get method as taught by Dr. Chuck (see Coding 101 part 7 for more details).

words = dict()
for word in wordlist :
____if word in excluded : continue
____words[word] = words.get(word,0) + 1

Coding 101 (fun with lists)

18/04/2016 By debkr

This is me just mucking about with lists, testing out what I’ve learnt so far and applying it to little problems I might want to solve. I find it the best way to learn, and it’s more fun than reading books!

Project 1: Building a tagging engine (Mon 18Apr16)

1. This snippet splits each line into a list, creates an iteration variable to loop through all words in the line list and print them out. I add various print statements at suitable points (both variable print statements and descriptive text statements) to help me test the program structure, to make sure it’s doing what I want and expect it to at each point through the loop. [Read more…] about Coding 101 (fun with lists)

Coding 101 (part 5)

11/04/2016 By debkr

This post follows on from earlier Coding 101 posts and records my responses and learnings from the highly-recommended Python programming book and Coursera specialisation by Charles Severance (see References below).

Opening data files:
In all our previous examples we used data as a constant (i.e. hard-coded into the program some way) or we prompted the user to enter some data which was then manipulated by the program in some way. We want to be able to read data from a variety of sources though – either from files, or from the web – and we know these are going to be much larger data sources, so we’ll need to be able to access and save files on our hard drive somewhere. [Read more…] about Coding 101 (part 5)

Coding 101 (part 2)

21/03/2016 By debkr

This post follows on from my earlier post Coding 101, and is my responses and learnings from the highly-recommended Python programming book and course by Charles Severance (see References below).

Jargon:
I’m working on a glossary here, but still very unstructured and massively incomplete so I suggest staying with Google for now .

Some necessary concepts:
Programming consists of sentences or statements, which may include reserved words, which tell Python what we want it to do, but will also include some values in both numerical and text formats. These take the form of either constants, whose values don’t change, and variables, [Read more…] about Coding 101 (part 2)