Knowing how often a word appears in a sentence or block of text is helpful for creating word clouds and other types of word analysis. And it’s more useful when running it against lots of text.

Create a program that reads in a file and counts the frequency of words in the file. Then construct a histogram displaying the words and the frequency, and display the histogram to the screen.

Example Output

Given the text file words.txt with this content

the program would produce the following output:

Constraint

• Ensure that the most used word is at the top of the report and the least used words are at the bottom.

Challenges

• Use a graphical program and generate bar graphs.

• Test the performance of your calculation by providing a very large input file, such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth.^[4] Tweak your algorithm so that it performs the word counting as fast as possible.

• Write the program in another language and compare the processing times of the two implementations.