Styjun

I am writing a function in Python 3 called word_count (that takes in a parameter, which I have called my_string) that is supposed to count the number of words in a string. The string might contain words with multiple space (e.g. hello there), and the function needs to be able to count that it is two words. I'm not supposed to use any built-in Python functions, and I am using try-except as well if I encounter any errors (e.g. if a value is interested that isn't a string, except will execute returning "Not a string"

I have been able to write a function, and I created a counter variable called numspaces, which I have initialized to 0. I then write try, then a for loop with an index variable called current_character that will run through all the current characters in my_string. I have written a conditional saying if current_character is equal to a space, numspaces needs to increment by one, and numwords (a variable I use to keep count of total number of words in a string) is equal to numspaces + 1. I then wrote an else if statement that say if numspaces equals 0, numwords = 1 and return numwords. If an error is encountered, I have written an except that returns "Not a string"

def word_count(my_string):
 numspaces = 0
 try:
 for current_character in my_string:
 if current_character == " ":
 numspaces += 1
 numwords = numspaces + 1
 elif numspaces == 0:
 numwords = 1
 return numwords
 except:
 return "Not a string"

Below are some test cases, and expected results when using the test cases:

Word Count: 4
Word Count: 2
Word Count: Not a string
Word Count: Not a string
Word Count: Not a string

print("Word Count:", word_count("Four words are here!"))
print("Word Count:", word_count("Hi David"))
print("Word Count:", word_count(5))
print("Word Count:", word_count(5.1))
print("Word Count:", word_count(True))

When I run the code I have written, I get the following output:

Word Count: 4
Word Count: 4
Word Count: Not a string
Word Count: Not a string
Word Count: Not a string

I am not sure how to tweak my code to account for something like Test Case 2 ("Hi David")

There are at least two options:

1. Replace all double spaces, until you have only single spaces before you start counting


2. Keep track, what the previous character was and add extra conditions