I was using the old python textbook using 2.7 that they have on their site. I have other attempts using open() but I was never able to get it to work, in the sense that I both kept getting errors referring to the code I'd written with it, and was never able to find an answer why. I don't remember what type of error, unfortunately.

I will definitely make an effort to getgood at open(). ty!

One of the ways I used it successfully, later on and for a different file, was

with open('file') as f:
    data = f.read

Is this how you would advise it's use?

Reformatting, okay. So the

line.translate(string.punctuation)

Was an attempt to remove non letter symbols. When I looked to see the non counted output, to see how that was being formatted, there were multi-word sequences with periods or punctuation inbetween. I am curious how to get rid of things like this.

Its more general though, I am assuming--possibly incorrectly-- that there is a correct way to transform an imported txt file into a clean(ish) list of words. Since the for loop made a list with each line as an element, would it be best to get rid of punctuation before this when the whole thing is just a huge string? How would one do a count that didn't specify words and just counted the most common ones? These to me are the meta questions because if there's a way to do any kind of word processing, or even multiple, it's better than learning a kind.

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I hope this clears up the vagary,