How to Find Unique Words in a Text File Using Python

In this tutorial, we will learn how to find unique words in a text file using Python programming. This is quite useful and practical in many operations including text analysis, and natural language processing (NLP). We will use Python’s built-in libraries to read the text file, process the data, and find unique words.

Step 1: Install Necessary Python Modules

If you haven’t done so already, you’ll need to install Python on your machine. You can download the latest version from the official website.

Step 2: Import the Necessary Libraries

We will use Python’s built-in library called os to interact with the operating system. We will also use the collections library to find unique words.

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import os
from collections import Counter

Step 3: Read the Text File

First off, we need to open and read the content of the text file. Make sure that your text file is in the same directory as your Python script.

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with open('myfile.txt', 'r') as file:
    data = file.read().replace('\n', ' ')

This code snippet will open the text file named ‘myfile.txt’ and read its content. The replace function is used to replace newline characters with spaces.

Step 4: Find Unique Words

Now that we have the content of the text file in a string, we can find the unique words in it. We will use the Counter function from the collections library to find these unique words and their frequency.

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wordCount = Counter(data.split())
print(wordCount)

The split function is used to separate each word, and the Counter function counts the frequency of each word appearing in the text file. The results will be printed to the console.

Here’s the full code:

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import os
from collections import Counter
 
with open('myfile.txt', 'r') as file:
    data = file.read().replace('\n', ' ')
 
wordCount = Counter(data.split())
print(wordCount)

Conclusion

This is how you can find unique words in a text file using Python. Python’s built-in libraries make it quite easy to perform such tasks. With the knowledge of this tutorial, you should be able to efficiently extract, manipulate, and analyze data from text files. Happy coding!