which data struct?

Hi, I recently learned about different data structures and I have an assignment where I have to make a word frequency counter.

Basically, I need to read in a text file and print out to stdout a list of all the unique words in the file and how many times they appear in descending order. I was wondering what people would think is the best data structure to use to implement this as I would also need to sort the structures when printing out the frequencies in descending order.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks.

I would beleve that a linked list would be the best since it is an easy way to sort, and provides an easy way to store any multitude of names.

I would use a binary search tree, it's already sorted by definition and a snap to check if a new word already exists :-)

Code:

tree *add(tree *root, char *word)
{
  int cmp;

  if (root == 0) /* Doesn't exist, add it */
  {
    root = malloc(sizeof *root);
    root->word = malloc(strlen(word)+1);
    /* Error checking not implemented for simplicity */
    root->frequency = 1;
    root->left = root->right = 0;
    strcpy(root->word,word);
  }
  else if((cmp = strcmp(word, root->word)) < 0)
  {
    root->left = add(root->left, word);
  }
  else if(cmp > 0)
  {
    root->right = add(root->right, word);
  }
  else /* Match */
  {
    root->frequency++;
  }

  return root;
}

With word frequencies you also don't have to worry about tree balancing unless the input file is a dictionary or something equally sorted, but that's not likely since you're counting occurances. :-)

Thanks for your replies. I was wondering...if I choose the binary search tree method and store the word and frequency in each node, what would be the best way to then resort the tree by frequencies? (Since I have to print them out in descending order). I am assuming the original tree would be sorted by the words.

One idea I had was to make each node of the tree store the word and point to another node in a linked list of integers, and when I have to sort the integers, I just sort the linked list. What do you guys think? Thanks in advance for any ideas. :-)