This script counts three-word phrases (trigrams) across STDIN or multiple text files, and then displays the top 100 phrases to the console.

Please install Python 3.x. I tested the script successfully with Python 3.7.0 on Windows 10 and Python 3.5.2 on Ubuntu Linux.

python -m unittest discover

cat file.txt | python counter.py

python counter.py file1.txt file2.txt

Natural language processing can get complicated and I made some simplifying assumptions, such as:

1. Words like "Python's" will render as "python" "s" (two words).

2. It's up for debate whether you call this a bug or not, but I found that on Windows on Git Bash and in the default commandline, the final entry for the command python counter.py text/Origin.txt will always be 33 - at the present. But in an Ubuntu VM, it was not deterministic. The last entry would float around among several phrases that scored 33. You could "fix" this by doing a second sort on the dictionary such that whenever multiple phrases have the same score, they get sorted in some kind of order like alphabetic. But this would be sort of arbitrary.