title: Create Python Dictionary from text file and retrieve count of each word
body: <p>I'm trying to create a dictionary of words from a text file and then count the instance of each word and be able to search for a word in the dictionary and receive its count but I am at a stand still. I am having the most trouble making the text file words lowercase and removing their punctuation because otherwise my count will be off. Any suggestions?</p>
  
  <pre><code>f=open("C:\Users\Mark\Desktop\jefferson.txt","r")
  wc={}
  words = f.read().split()
  count = 0
  i = 0
  for line in f: count += len(line.split())
  for w in words: if i &lt; count: words[i].translate(None, string.punctuation).lower() i += 1 else: i += 1 print words
  for w in words: if w not in wc: wc[w] = 1 else: wc[w] += 1
  print wc['states']
  </code></pre>