Chapter 8, Problem 8.31ASME

(Text Analysis) The availability of computers with string-manipulation capabilities has resulted in some rather interesting approaches to analyzing the writings of great authors. Much attention has been focused on whether William Shakespeare ever lived. Some scholars find substantial evidence that Christopher Marlowe actually penned the masterpieces attributed to Shakespeare. Researchers have used computers to find similarities in the writings of these two authors. This exercise examines three methods for analyzing texts with a computer.

1. Write a program that reads several lines of text and prints a table indicating the number of occurrences of each letter of the alphabet in the text. For example, the phrase
2. To be, or not to be: that is the question: contains one “a,” two “b’s,” no “c’s,” and so on.
3. Write a program that reads several lines of text and prints a table indicating the number of one-letter words, two-letter words, three-letter words, and so on, appearing in the text. For example, the phrase

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer contains



4. Write a program that reads several lines of text and prints a table indicating the number of occurrences of each different word in the text. The program should include the words in the table in the same order in which they appear in the text. For example, the lines

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer contain the words “to” three times, “be” two times, “or” once, and so on.