Count distinct words from a dataframe in python pandas

Question

I tried to split words then count them by using python pandas.

The original data is like,

col_A 

happy, not happy
sad,happy
sad, happy
angry, happy
angry, sad

I tried using this function to count the words in col_A.

word_list= df.col_A.apply(lambda x: pd.value_counts(x.split(","))).sum(axis=0)

word_list.sort_values(ascending = False)

It will give me the results like,

angry       2
happy       2
sad         2
 happy      2
 not happy  1
 sad        1

How can I avoid these blanks to return the real counts of values?

I want to return a list like,

happy      4
sad        3
angry      2
not happy  1

Answer 1

Here is a solution which is very similar to @anky_91's one:

In [96]: df.col_A.str.replace(r"\s*,\s*", ",").str.get_dummies(",").sum()
Out[96]:
angry        2
happy        4
not happy    1
sad          3
dtype: int64