Constructing word clouds

In this recipe, we will create two word clouds. Both of them will use the text from the The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes book, and one of them will be shaped like a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes' head.

Getting ready

In order to complete this recipe, you will need to install the wordcloud package:

pip install wordcloud

How to do it…

We will define a function to that creates word clouds from text and then use it on the text of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

1. Import the necessary packages and functions:

   import os
   import nltk
   from os import path
   import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
   from wordcloud import WordCloud, STOPWORDS
   from Chapter01.dividing_into_sentences import read_text_file
   from Chapter01.removing_stopwords import compile_stopwords_list_frequency

2. Define the create_wordcloud function:

   def create_wordcloud(text, stopwords, filename):
       wordcloud = \
       WordCloud(min_font_size...