Python: Count the Total number of words in a file?

Question

for this program I'm trying to ask the user enter as much text as he/she wants in a file and have the program count the Total number of words that was stored in that file. For instance, if I type "Hi I like to eat blueberry pie" the program should read a total of 7 words. The program runs fine until I type in Option 6, where it counts the number of words. I always get this error: 'str' object has no attribute 'items'

#Prompt the user to enter a block of text.
done = False
textInput = ""
while(done == False):
    nextInput= input()
    if nextInput== "EOF":
        break
    else:
        textInput += nextInput

#Prompt the user to select an option from the Text Analyzer Menu.
print("Welcome to the Text Analyzer Menu! Select an option by typing a number"
    "\n1. shortest word"
    "\n2. longest word"
    "\n3. most common word"
    "\n4. left-column secret message!"
    "\n5. fifth-words secret message!"
    "\n6. word count"
    "\n7. quit")

#Set option to 0.
option = 0

#Use the 'while' to keep looping until the user types in Option 7.
while option !=7:
    option = int(input())

    #I get the error in this section of the code.
    #If the user selects Option 6, print out the total number of words in the
    #text.
    elif option == 6:
        count = {}
        for i in textInput:
            if i in count:
                count[i] += 1
            else:
                count[i] = 1
        #The error lies in the for loop below. 
        for word, times in textInput.items():
            print(word , times)

Solution

The issue here is that textInput is a string, so it doesn't have the items() method.

If you only want the number of words, you can try using len:

print len(textInput.split(' '))

If you want each word, and their respective occurrences, you need to use count instead of textInput:

    count = {}
    for i in textInput.split(' '):
        if i in count:
            count[i] += 1
        else:
            count[i] = 1
    for word, times in count.items():
        print(word , times)

Comments

[OdraEncoded]

By the way, .split() without arguments removes any white space character inlucing new lines and tabs. .split(' ') will remove only words separated by a space.