advanced patterns When Using a Dictionary to Count Frequencies of Characters in a String with Special Characters
I've been banging my head against this for hours. I'm refactoring my project and I'm working on a personal project and I'm trying to count the frequency of each character in a string using a dictionary in Python 3.9, but I'm running into an unexpected scenario when special characters are involved... Here's the code I've written to do so: ```python def count_characters(s): char_count = {} for char in s: if char in char_count: char_count[char] += 1 else: char_count[char] = 1 return char_count input_string = 'Hello, World! @2023' result = count_characters(input_string) print(result) ``` When I run this code, I expect to see a count of each character, including spaces and punctuation. However, the output is correct except for special characters, which are not counted properly. In the output, I see some characters like '@' and '!' showing up only once, even though they appear more than once in the input string, which is confusing. The output I get is: ``` {'H': 1, 'e': 1, 'l': 3, 'o': 2, ',': 1, ' ': 1, 'W': 1, 'r': 1, 'd': 1, '!': 1, '2': 1, '0': 1, '3': 1} ``` I’ve already checked if there are any hidden characters or whitespace issues, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I also tried printing the `ord(char)` for each character to see if there were any discrepancies in their ASCII values, but everything looks normal. Am I missing something in my approach, or is there something specific about how special characters are handled in dictionaries that I need to consider? Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. This is part of a larger web app I'm building. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. What's the correct way to implement this? Thanks, I really appreciate it!