CSc 120: Fake News

1. The program will be altered to use Python lists instead of your LinkedList class.
2. Sorting will be done using the merge sort algorithm. (Merging of lists starts on slide 50 in the class notes on recursion. Slides on merge sort then follow.)
3. If more than one word has the same count, those words are shown in alphabetical order, as specified under Output Format.

Expected Behavior

Input format

Output format

• In example 1 note that "the" and "trump" both appear 35 times; "the" is shown first because it is lexicographically less than "trump".
• In example 2 there is a four-way tie between "are", "fbi", "not", and "over".

In the vernacular of sorting it is said that the count is a primary key and the word itself is a secondary key.

Programming Requirements

1. Instead of using a LinkedList that contains instances of Node, change your code to use a Python list that contains instances of a new class, Word:

   class Word

   An object of this class represents information about a word. It should contain (at least) the following attributes:

   • _word: the word string.
   • _count: a count of the number of occurrences of the word.

   It should implement (at least) the following methods:

   • __init__(self, word): initializes the object's attributes as follows: _word is set to word; _count is set to 1.
   • word(self): returns the value of _word.
   • count(self): returns the value of _count.
   • incr(self): increments the value of _count.
   • __str__(self) and, optionally, __repr__(self).

2. On assignment 8 you wrote a sort() method for LinkedList. In this problem the Python list of Word instances must be sorted using the merge sort algorithm. Code for the msort(L) function is shown on slide 73 in the class notes on recursion.

Errors

Examples