import string fname = raw_input('Enter the file name: ') try: fhand = open(fname) except: print 'File cannot be opened:', fname exit() counts = dict() for line in fhand: line = line.translate(None, string.punctuation) line = line.lower() words = line.split() for word in words: if word not in counts: counts[word] = 1 else: counts[word] += 1 print counts