help make it faster please

[Sybren Stuvel]

Bengt Richter enlightened us with:
> I suspect it's not possible to get '' in the list from
> somestring.split()

Time to adjust your suspicions:

>>> ';abc;'.split(';')
['', 'abc', '']


>>                    countDict[w] += 1
>>                else:
>>                    countDict[w] = 1
> does that beat the try and get versions? I.e., (untested)
>                  try: countDict[w] += 1
>                  except KeyError: countDict[w] = 1

OPs way is faster. A 'try' block is very fast, but trowing & handling
an exception is slow.

>                  countDict[w] = countDict.get(w, 0) + 1

I think this has the potential of being faster than OPs method,
because it's likely to be fully implemented in C.

Sybren
-- 
The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a
capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the
safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself? 
                                             Frank Zappa