Python Exercises - Count the Words

My Python solution to the problem "count the frequency of words from a given input stream" is here at ideone.com.

I started out by using a For loop to send each word from a single line to the dictionary mapping function. Once this was working and proved that the dictionary mapping function worked, I re-factored the code to use the map() function instead of the For loop. Perhaps I could save some time in the mapping function (named wordcounter) by using the .setdefault method of the Dictionary object instead of explicitly checking for a key's existence in the Dictionary every time the function is called.

Reading materials:
http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#dict

http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#map

Python Exercises - Reverse a String

As an exercise to gain more experience with Python, I wrote a function to reverse a string. Playing with ideone.com's online Python IDE was also a bonus. You can run the following code here. This is probably not the best way to solve this problem, but it works.

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# implement a function that reverses a string
def reverse_string(in_string):
        # reverse string using brute force
        print " input is %s" % in_string
        length = len(in_string)
        out_string = ""
        for position in range(length, 0, -1):
                out_string += in_string[position-1]
        print "output is %s" % out_string
        return out_string
 
a = reverse_string("1234")
print a

While I am aware that Python already provides a reversed() function as well as a .reverse() method for List objects, I wanted to gain the experience of having written a function to perform the task myself, so I wrote one. In retrospect, reading this sooner might have helped me write this code in far fewer lines. 

Robot Framework

A great blog post by Frank Berthold helped me learn to use Robot Framework. Some questions remained for me after reading Robot Framework's Quick Start Guide, and Frank's blog post answered them. My application was a content management system, and for historical purposes is available online here.

Here is one of the test suites that I came up with for testing the application:

*** Testcases ***
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