Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

Re:Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties,... by follower on Thursday October 21, 2010 @03:13PM (#1817013)

> Or write a program which takes this post as input and tells me what the 3rd most common letter used was.

I'm going for 'a'.

And, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_letter_frequency_(... (via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency) your four most frequently used letters match the table for English.

Tested in Python 2.7:

  s = "your text here"

  import string

  d = {}

  for i in list(s.lower()):
    if i in string.letters:
      d[i] = d.setdefault(i, 0) + 1

  print sorted(d.keys(), cmp = lambda x, y : cmp(d[x], d[y]), reverse = True)[2]

Edit: See my later response for something using the 'collections' module.

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Re:Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties,... by ciupicri on Friday October 22, 2010 @11:34AM (#1820025)

You don't need to do `list(s.lower())`, you can already iterate over a string. Also, instead of converting the whole string to a new lowercase one, which means allocating "a lot" of memory, you can convert each character separately as needed.

[ Parent | on HN ]