Counting Words

Skill Level: Intermediate
Time Limit: 15-20 minutes

Variations of this challenge are pretty common in code interviews and phone screens for software engineering. The task may differ but the fundamentals are usually pretty much the same - Given a file, read it, and parse the data.

Instructions

• Read the speech.txt file and display a count of the most commonly used words in the document.
• Your list of commonly used words should be human readable and in descending order by count.

Things to Think About

• What would you test first?
• What are the edge cases?
• Is your solution object oriented?

Example

Given: "The cat is tall. The cat is much bigger than the mouse."

Then:

3 - the
2 - cat
2 - is
1 - tall
1 - much
1 - bigger
1 - than
1 - mouse