Top Common Words Solved

Restrictions and Requirements

    • No global variables may be used

    • Your submission must contain at least 2 or more .cpp files and one or more .h files

    • Your submission must have at least 3 user defined functions in it in addition to main

Description

Write a program that displays the top N most occuring words in a file along with the number of times the word appeared.

Additional Details

    • Words should be displayed from most commonly occuring to least commonly occuring

    • A word is considered to be 1 or more consecutive alphanumeric characters

    • Case does not matter when counting words

        ◦ HELLO and hello are to be considered the same word

        ◦ When displaying the most commonly occuring words they should all be displayed in lowercase
    • When counting a word all leading and trailing non-alphabetical, non-numeric characters should removed for a more accurate count
        ◦ For example

            ▪ hello

            ▪ hello,

            ▪ hello.

            ▪ hello;

            ▪ !!$#%hello<>?/

        ◦ Are all considered to be the same word

        ◦ The complete list of special characters is: ,.:;"|\!@#$%^&*()_+-=[]{}<>?/~`'

    • If multiple words tie for most commonly occurring they should all be displayed

        ◦ These words should be displayed in alphabetical order

    • You should ignore the following words when counting the most common occurring words because they are so frequent and aren't interesting
        ◦ a, an, and, in, is, it the

    • If there are fewer than N unique occurences of a word all words should be displayed

        ◦ For example if there were 5 unique words in a file but the user asked to display the top 10 words then only the top 5 will be displayed as there are only 5 words in the file

Input

    • All input will be valid


Command Line Arguments

    • First Argument: The path to the file

        ◦ Required

    • Second Argument: N, the number of top words to find

        ◦ Will always be an integer greater than or equal to 1

        ◦ Optional. If not given N should default to 10

Hints

    • When opening the file to read from it make sure to use only an ​i​fstream and not an fstream. This is because you only have read permissions on the files on Kodethon and opening a file with an fstream requires both read and write permissions. Since you don’t have write permissions attempting to open a file with an fstream in testing will cause you to fail with weird behavior.
    • The ​algorithm library​contains many useful functions for helping to solve this problem

    • You will find ​maps​to be incredibly useful in solving this problem

        ◦ By default a map will sort the values in ascending order. You can change this by providing a comparator function. ​This example​shows how to do that.
Examples

    • Input has been underlined so that you can differentiate between what is input and what is output

        ◦ You do not have to underline anything

    • Assume that shake_it_off.txt contains the lyrics to Taylor Swift's song "Shake it Off" which can be found here: ​shake_it_off.txt
    • I’ve also provided an example executable named ExampleTopCommonWords that can be run by doing ​./ExampleTopCommonWords path_to_file num_words_to_find

        ◦ It is only guaranteed to run on Kodethon and may not run on your personal computer

Example 1

./TopCommonWords ​shake_it_off.txt 5
1.) These words appeared 78 times: {shake}

2.) These words appeared 70 times: {i}

3.) These words appeared 44 times: {off}

4.) These words appeared 21 times: {gonna}

5.) These words appeared 15 times: {break, fake, hate, play}