Most efficient algorithm for getting the word frequencies in a stream of characters?

Question

I have a dictionary of words and a stream of incoming characters. I need to create a map of words present in the stream along with their frequencies. How can I achieve this efficiently?

• Kilian Foth: You maintain a mapping from words to their occurrence counts. That should take less processing time than processing the I/O. Which part would you like help with?
• Dan Pichelman: Are you able to easily recognize word boundaries (i.e., does your stream of incoming characters include spaces and newlines)?
• Nikant: I am able to recognize word boundaries with spaces. But I need to keep track of word frequencies as the characters come without storing the whole text.
• Robert Harvey: Do you want to use the dictionary or another collection for maintaining the word counts?
• Nikant: I want to use a dictionary

Answer 1

A dictionary where the key is the word encountered, and the value is a count of the number of times that word is encountered. I think your question has some hidden problem you did not explain. This is trivial.