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

How about using Counter from collections ?

import re
from collections import Counter

words = re.findall(r'\w+', string)
print (Counter(words))