How to calculate the number of appearance of each letter(A-Z ,a-z as well as '.' , ',' and ' ' ) in a text file in matlab? - matlab

Question

How can I go about doing this? So far I've opened the file like this
fileID = fopen('hamlet.txt'.'r');
[A,count] = fscanf(fileID, '%s');
fclose(fileID);

Answer 1

Getting spaces from the file
First, if you want to capture spaces, you'll need to change your format specifier. %s reads only non-whitespace characters.
>> fileID = fopen('space.txt','r');
>> A = fscanf(fileID, '%s');
>> fclose(fileID);
>> A
A = Thistexthasspacesinit.
Instead, we can use %c:
>> fileID = fopen('space.txt','r');
>> A = fscanf(fileID, '%c');
>> fclose(fileID);
>> A
A = This text has spaces in it.
Mapping between characters and values (array indices)
We could create a character array that contains all of the target characters to look for:
search_chars = ['A':'Z', 'a':'z', ',', '.', ' '];
That would work, but to map the character to a position in the array you'd have to do something like:
>> char_pos = find(search_chars == 'q')
char_pos = 43
You could also use containters.Map, but that seems like overkill.
Instead, let's use the ASCII value of each character. For convenience, we'll use only values 1:126 (0 is NUL, and 127 is DEL. We should never encounter either of those.) Converting from characters to their ASCII code is easy:
>> c = 'q'
c = s
>> a = uint8(c) % MATLAB actually does this using double(). Seems wasteful to me.
a = 115
>> c2 = char(a)
c2 = s
Note that by doing this, you're counting characters that are not in your desired list like ! and *. If that's a problem, then use search_chars and figure out how you want to map from characters to indices.
Looping solution
The most intuitive way to count each character is a loop. For each character in A, find its ASCII code and increment the counter array at that index.
char_count = zeros(1, 126);
for current_char = A
c = uint8(current_char);
char_count(c) = char_count(c) + 1;
end
Now you've got an array of counts for each character with ASCII codes from 1 to 126. To find out how many instances of 's' there are, we can just use its ASCII code as an index:
>> char_count(115)
ans = 4
We can even use the character itself as an index:
>> char_count('s')
ans = 4
Vectorized solution
As you can see with that last example, MATLAB's weak typing makes characters and their ASCII codes pretty much equivalent. In fact:
>> 's' == 115
ans = 1
That means that we can use implicit broadcasting and == to create a logical 2D array where L(c,a) == 1 if character c in our string A has an ASCII code of a. Then we can get the count for each ASCII code by summing along the columns.
L = (A.' == [1:126]);
char_count = sum(L, 1);
A one-liner
Just for fun, I'll show one more way to do this: histcounts. This is meant to put values into bins, but as we said before, characters can be treated like values.
char_count = histcounts(uint8(A), 1:126);
There are dozens of other possibilities, for instance you could use the search_chars array and ismember(), but this should be a good starting point.

Answer 2

With [A,count] = fscanf(fileID, '%s'); you'll only count all string letters, doesn't matter which one. You can use regexp here which search for each letter you specify and will put it in a cell array. It consists of fields which contains the indices of your occuring letters. In the end you only sum the number of indices and you have the count for each letter:
fileID = fopen('hamlet.txt'.'r');
A = fscanf(fileID, '%s');
indexCellArray = regexp(A,{'A','B','C','D',... %I'm too lazy to add the other letters now^^
'a','b','c','d',...
','.' '};
letterCount = cellfun(#(x) numel(x),indexCellArray);
fclose(fileID);
Maybe you put the cell array in a struct where you can give fieldnames for the letters, otherwise you might loose track which count belongs to which number.
Maybe there's much easier solution, cause this one is kind of exhausting to put all the letters in the regexp but it works.