Print the top 5 most frequent words in a text file

Question

Good evening,

I am in the process of creating a script to search and print specific information contained in a text file with over 400K lines.

I have narrowed down the lines to only include lines that contain the word "TCP" which total to 40K.

Within the if statement (also in a loop) that narrowed down the lines, I need to then print the top 5 words:

for line in file1:

if line != ' ':

# Will search for lines that contain TCP.
if "PROTO=TCP" in line:
x = x + 1

For example, each line in the file contains the string DST=(a particular number). I was wondering how can I go through 40k lines to only look for DST=# and present them as the top 5 most frequent?

Is there a resource I can use to figure this out?

Any help with this would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

look up counter from the collection module in python.org. there's an example there that does exactly what you're looking to do.