collections.Counter
Count how many times each item occurs.
Python 3.13
collections.Counter([iterable])Parameters
- iterableIterable | Mappingoptional
- The items to count, or a dictionary with ready counts.
Return value
A Counter object, a dictionary subclass of the form {item: count}.
Examples
Counting list items
Python 3.13
from collections import Counter
print(Counter(['apple', 'pear', 'apple']))Counter({'apple': 2, 'pear': 1})Most common characters
Python 3.13
from collections import Counter
counts = Counter('abracadabra')
print(counts.most_common(2))[('a', 5), ('b', 2)]Details
A missing item gives 0 instead of KeyError. The most_common(n) method returns the n most frequent items.