A brief demo of a word counter

01_word_counter.py

import re
from collections import Counter

RE_CHAR = re.compile('\w')

def count_better_parser(stream):
    counter = Counter()
    word = ''
    for i,char in enumerate(iter(lambda: stream.read(1), '')):
        if char is None:
            break
        if not RE_CHAR.match(char):
            if word:
                counter[word] += 1
                word = ''
        else:
            word += char
    if word:
        counter[word] += 1
    return dict(counter)