Re: Guy Macon's adventures with ASCII character frequency

From: Douglas A. Gwyn (DAGwyn_at_null.net)
Date: 01/22/05 

Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 17:48:57 -0500

Guy Macon wrote:
> I want a list that includes the space, punctuation,
> numerals, upper case and lower case, not just letters.
> I strongly suspect that the space character is more
> common that E or e is, for example.

The letter E occurs about 17% of the time on the
average in "telegraphic" English text (which has
no nonalphabetic characters, and spells out some
punctuation). Since the average English word
size is about five characters, if space is
included as a word separator that means that space
occurs about 17% of the time, and E occurs about
14% of the time.

> Does anyone know where I can find such a list?

If you want to determine relative character frequencies
in a corpus of representative text stored in files, it
is easy to do so with a simple computer program.

> How about one with all the possible Digraphs?

All digraphs are *possible*, QXIHML. If you want to
determine their relative frequencies in a corpus of
representative text stored in files, it is easy to do
so with a simple computer program.

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