Trying to count words in a string

Question

I\'m trying to analyze the contents of a string. If it has a punctuation mixed in the word I want to replace them with spaces.

For example, If Johnny.Appleseed!is:a*good

Answer 1

try this: it parses the word_list using re, then creates a dictionary of word:appearances

import re
word_list = re.findall(r"[\w']+", string)
print {word:word_list.count(word) for word in word_list}