Programming Challenge: Freestyle textual analysis.

Emerald_Knight
2018-07-18T05:00:53Z

I just realized that I completely glossed over this week's programming challenge. For this week, let's do something more flexible: write a program that accepts a file as input--either through a file name/path or through standard input--and perform any form of analysis you want on its contents. That's it!

For instance, you could count the occurrences of each word and find the most common ones, or you could determine the average sentence length, or the average unique words per sentence. You could even perform an analysis on changes in words and sentence structure over time (could be useful for e.g. poetry where metre may play an important role). You can stick with simple numbers or dive right into the grittiest forms of textual analysis currently available. You could output raw text or even a graphical representation. You could even do a bit of everything!

How simple or complex your solution ends up being is completely up to you, but I encourage you to challenge yourself by e.g. learning a new language or about different textual analysis techniques, or by focusing on code quality rather than complexity, or even by taking a completely different approach to the problem than you ordinarily would. There are a lot of learning opportunities available here.

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