TTDS: Lab 0

How to read a text file from hard-disk. This lab is optional for those who are not fully confident about their programming skills. There is nothing specific to be done in this lab more than reading a text file from HD word by word, which is the most basic skill you need to have to be able to take the course.

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

• You need to have Perl or Python on your machine (you still can use something else) if you prefer.
• If you are using Dice, then you should have them there. Check with demonstrators how to run them.

DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE TEXT FILE

• Download the following file, which has the text of the Bible: link

SKILLS TO DO WITH THE FILE

You need to be confident with the following skills with any programming language when dealing with a text file:

• Reading and Writing into text files
• Reading text by word, and calling functions to process word if required (e.g. lower case word letters)
• Regular expressions would be very useful to know
• Count the number of occurences of the words: "lord", "to", and "36"

USEFUL TIPS

Python Tutorials: you can check one of these tutorials:

• Tutorial 1: Code Academy
• Tutorial 2: MIT

Useful Shell Commands 
Print frequency of unique terms in a given collection: 
- cat text.file | tr " " "\n" | tr "A-Z" "a-z" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n > terms.freq 
- cat text.file | perl -p -e "s/[^\w]+/\n/g" | tr "A-Z" "a-z" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n > terms.freq

All Unix Shell Commands for Windows: 
- download: here 
- unzip the directory at a decent location on your drive (e.g. c:\ or c:\program files\) 
- add the path to the "bin" directory to your Windows path: (example)