Same Question, Different Data Structure

Hey all, I wrote in here a while aog about how we had to do an assignment for my Data structrues class and we couldn't use any real data structures, well now that we have begun the data strcutres part of the class, we have done hash tables. Not too clear on the concept, we we have an assignment to do using hash tables. The assignment is the same as the previous one, except we have to store the data into a hash table.

Here are the details on the assignment: For my Data Structures class we have to count how many times a character, a number, and a word occurs in a file. After I do the counting, I need to display the top 10 from each category.

If anyone has any Ideas how the functions work, or look like, or anything, that would be awesome. Any help would be wonderful.

Thank you and have a great weekend!