1.1 A function that counts

just setup

A word counter needs a way to count. A function, count, takes a text and gives a dictionary from each word to how many times it appears. It goes in src/tally/__init__.py, above main. The command does not use it yet.

A patch to src/tally/__init__.py.

In src/tally/__init__.py, count now stands above main. It splits the text at every space, tab and end of line. For each word, it adds 1 to the count so far, and counts.get(word, 0) gives 0 for a word it has not seen.

uv run python -c "from tally import count; print(count('a b a'))"

It prints {'a': 2, 'b': 1}, two of a and one of b. So the function works, though the command still has nothing to count.

@@ -1,5 +1,12 @@
 """tally: count the words in a text."""
 
 
+def count(text):
+    counts = {}
+    for word in text.split():
+        counts[word] = counts.get(word, 0) + 1
+    return counts
+
+
 def main() -> None:
     print("tally: nothing to count yet")