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Is there a location I can download character distributions for frequency analysis used in decryption attempt validation? I am specifically interested in ASCII value [32, 126] frequency distribution for plain English language text. This would imply case-sensitivity and include punctuation. I'm not concerned with data formats.

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  • You might have to take some larger body (the standard term is 'corpus', such as BYU's Corpus of Contemporary American English and reduce it yourself. Most focus on words & phrases, so might not have all of the punctuation and such that you're asking for.
    – Joe
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 14:45

2 Answers 2

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Second try: Google Ngram Viewer contains raw counts of 1-, 2-, ...-grams of text, retrieved from its book scanning endeavor. The section 1-grams contains counts of the occurence of lettres, numbers and even punctuation. They are provided as tab-separated value files, so the frequencies should be derivable with modest scripting efforts.

Found via Wikipedia article Text corpus.

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What about the (frequency analysis) article's first link to Letter frequency (Wikipedia)? It lists letter distribution for English and other languages, all properly sourced:

Letter   Relfreq
----------------
e        12.702%    
t         9.056%    
a         8.167%    
o         7.507%    
i         6.966%    
n         6.749%    
s         6.327%    
...
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  • I was looking for all ASCII values [0,127] or at least printable ASCII values [32,126]. Commented Sep 26, 2013 at 13:52
  • @awashburn Why can't you manually convert them?
    – Kermit
    Commented Sep 26, 2013 at 18:31
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    @FreshPrinceOfSO these table only deal with a case-insensitive alphabet, while the question asks for ASCII frequencies, so at least lower-/uppercase letters, numbers and punctuation should be included. This is what I tried to address in my second answer.
    – ojdo
    Commented Sep 26, 2013 at 19:51

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