[python] count words in a text

I recently discovered a one-liner to count the words from a text in python:

text = "Tags help people find your post - think of them as the topics or categories that best describe your post."

from collections import Counter

words = Counter(text)[" "] #19

to put it more accurately, this counts the number of spaces (" ") in a text.

moreover, Counter is a python mapping that creates a dict in which keys are every unique letter from a text, and the corresponding values are the number of occurrences of that letter.

a mapping is an iterable container with a fixed length. this means three things (accordingly):

1. you can loop through its items
2. you can check existence of an item using in keyword (e.g., "x" in words)
3. len(words) returns an integer