Highest frequency characters in a string using Python

• Input: “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”
• Output: [‘e’, ‘o’]

 

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text = "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"

letters = {}
for letter in text:
    if letter == " ":
        continue
    if letter not in letters:
        letters[letter] = 0
    letters[letter] = letters[letter] + 1

top_frequency = max(letters.values())

frequent_letters = [l for l, f in letters.items() if f >= top_frequency]
print(frequent_letters)

 

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• Interviewer: Rewrite without max().
• Me: You wanna test my knowledge of such a silly max algorithm?
• Interviewer: 🤓