Generating Ngrams (Unigrams,Bigrams etc) from a large corpus of .txt files and their Frequency

Just use ntlk.ngrams.

import nltk
from nltk import word_tokenize
from nltk.util import ngrams
from collections import Counter

text = "I need to write a program in NLTK that breaks a corpus (a large collection of \
txt files) into unigrams, bigrams, trigrams, fourgrams and fivegrams.\ 
I need to write a program in NLTK that breaks a corpus"
token = nltk.word_tokenize(text)
bigrams = ngrams(token,2)
trigrams = ngrams(token,3)
fourgrams = ngrams(token,4)
fivegrams = ngrams(token,5)

print Counter(bigrams)

Counter({('program', 'in'): 2, ('NLTK', 'that'): 2, ('that', 'breaks'): 2,
 ('write', 'a'): 2, ('breaks', 'a'): 2, ('to', 'write'): 2, ('I', 'need'): 2,
 ('a', 'corpus'): 2, ('need', 'to'): 2, ('a', 'program'): 2, ('in', 'NLTK'): 2,
 ('and', 'fivegrams'): 1, ('corpus', '('): 1, ('txt', 'files'): 1, ('unigrams', 
','): 1, (',', 'trigrams'): 1, ('into', 'unigrams'): 1, ('trigrams', ','): 1,
 (',', 'bigrams'): 1, ('large', 'collection'): 1, ('bigrams', ','): 1, ('of',
 'txt'): 1, (')', 'into'): 1, ('fourgrams', 'and'): 1, ('fivegrams', '.'): 1,
 ('(', 'a'): 1, (',', 'fourgrams'): 1, ('a', 'large'): 1, ('.', 'I'): 1, 
('collection', 'of'): 1, ('files', ')'): 1})

UPDATE (with pure python):

import os

corpus = []
path = '.'
for i in os.walk(path).next()[2]:
    if i.endswith('.txt'):
        f = open(os.path.join(path,i))
        corpus.append(f.read())
frequencies = Counter([])
for text in corpus:
    token = nltk.word_tokenize(text)
    bigrams = ngrams(token, 2)
    frequencies += Counter(bigrams)

If efficiency is an issue and you have to build multiple different n-grams, but you want to use pure python I would do:

from itertools import chain

def n_grams(seq, n=1):
    """Returns an iterator over the n-grams given a list_tokens"""
    shift_token = lambda i: (el for j,el in enumerate(seq) if j>=i)
    shifted_tokens = (shift_token(i) for i in range(n))
    tuple_ngrams = zip(*shifted_tokens)
    return tuple_ngrams # if join in generator : (" ".join(i) for i in tuple_ngrams)

def range_ngrams(list_tokens, ngram_range=(1,2)):
    """Returns an itirator over all n-grams for n in range(ngram_range) given a list_tokens."""
    return chain(*(n_grams(list_tokens, i) for i in range(*ngram_range)))

Usage :

>>> input_list = input_list = 'test the ngrams generator'.split()
>>> list(range_ngrams(input_list, ngram_range=(1,3)))
[('test',), ('the',), ('ngrams',), ('generator',), ('test', 'the'), ('the', 'ngrams'), ('ngrams', 'generator'), ('test', 'the', 'ngrams'), ('the', 'ngrams', 'generator')]

~Same speed as NLTK:

import nltk
%%timeit
input_list = 'test the ngrams interator vs nltk '*10**6
nltk.ngrams(input_list,n=5)
# 7.02 ms ± 79 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)

%%timeit
input_list = 'test the ngrams interator vs nltk '*10**6
n_grams(input_list,n=5)
# 7.01 ms ± 103 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)

%%timeit
input_list = 'test the ngrams interator vs nltk '*10**6
nltk.ngrams(input_list,n=1)
nltk.ngrams(input_list,n=2)
nltk.ngrams(input_list,n=3)
nltk.ngrams(input_list,n=4)
nltk.ngrams(input_list,n=5)
# 7.32 ms ± 241 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)

%%timeit
input_list = 'test the ngrams interator vs nltk '*10**6
range_ngrams(input_list, ngram_range=(1,6))
# 7.13 ms ± 165 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)

Repost from my previous answer.

Here is a simple example using pure Python to generate any ngram:

>>> def ngrams(s, n=2, i=0):
...     while len(s[i:i+n]) == n:
...         yield s[i:i+n]
...         i += 1
...
>>> txt = 'Python is one of the awesomest languages'

>>> unigram = ngrams(txt.split(), n=1)
>>> list(unigram)
[['Python'], ['is'], ['one'], ['of'], ['the'], ['awesomest'], ['languages']]

>>> bigram = ngrams(txt.split(), n=2)
>>> list(bigram)
[['Python', 'is'], ['is', 'one'], ['one', 'of'], ['of', 'the'], ['the', 'awesomest'], ['awesomest', 'languages']]

>>> trigram = ngrams(txt.split(), n=3)
>>> list(trigram)
[['Python', 'is', 'one'], ['is', 'one', 'of'], ['one', 'of', 'the'], ['of', 'the', 'awesomest'], ['the', 'awesomest',
'languages']]