How can I count the occurrences of a list item?

Question

Given an item, how can I count its occurrences in a list in Python?

Answer 1

To count the number of diverse elements having a common type:

li = ['A0','c5','A8','A2','A5','c2','A3','A9']

print sum(1 for el in li if el[0]=='A' and el[1] in '01234')

gives

3 , not 6

Answer 2

I've compared all suggested solutions (and a few new ones) with perfplot (a small project of mine).

Counting one item

For large enough arrays, it turns out that

numpy.sum(numpy.array(a) == 1) 

is slightly faster than the other solutions.

Counting all items

As established before,

numpy.bincount(a)

is what you want.

---

Code to reproduce the plots:

from collections import Counter
from collections import defaultdict
import numpy
import operator
import pandas
import perfplot


def counter(a):
    return Counter(a)


def count(a):
    return dict((i, a.count(i)) for i in set(a))


def bincount(a):
    return numpy.bincount(a)


def pandas_value_counts(a):
    return pandas.Series(a).value_counts()


def occur_dict(a):
    d = {}
    for i in a:
        if i in d:
            d[i] = d[i]+1
        else:
            d[i] = 1
    return d


def count_unsorted_list_items(items):
    counts = defaultdict(int)
    for item in items:
        counts[item] += 1
    return dict(counts)


def operator_countof(a):
    return dict((i, operator.countOf(a, i)) for i in set(a))


perfplot.show(
    setup=lambda n: list(numpy.random.randint(0, 100, n)),
    n_range=[2**k for k in range(20)],
    kernels=[
        counter, count, bincount, pandas_value_counts, occur_dict,
        count_unsorted_list_items, operator_countof
        ],
    equality_check=None,
    logx=True,
    logy=True,
    )

2.

from collections import Counter
from collections import defaultdict
import numpy
import operator
import pandas
import perfplot


def counter(a):
    return Counter(a)


def count(a):
    return dict((i, a.count(i)) for i in set(a))


def bincount(a):
    return numpy.bincount(a)


def pandas_value_counts(a):
    return pandas.Series(a).value_counts()


def occur_dict(a):
    d = {}
    for i in a:
        if i in d:
            d[i] = d[i]+1
        else:
            d[i] = 1
    return d


def count_unsorted_list_items(items):
    counts = defaultdict(int)
    for item in items:
        counts[item] += 1
    return dict(counts)


def operator_countof(a):
    return dict((i, operator.countOf(a, i)) for i in set(a))


perfplot.show(
    setup=lambda n: list(numpy.random.randint(0, 100, n)),
    n_range=[2**k for k in range(20)],
    kernels=[
        counter, count, bincount, pandas_value_counts, occur_dict,
        count_unsorted_list_items, operator_countof
        ],
    equality_check=None,
    logx=True,
    logy=True,
    )

Answer 3

Counting the occurrences of one item in a list

For counting the occurrences of just one list item you can use count()

>>> l = ["a","b","b"]
>>> l.count("a")
1
>>> l.count("b")
2

Counting the occurrences of all items in a list is also known as "tallying" a list, or creating a tally counter.

Counting all items with count()

To count the occurrences of items in l one can simply use a list comprehension and the count() method

[[x,l.count(x)] for x in set(l)]

(or similarly with a dictionary dict((x,l.count(x)) for x in set(l)))

Example:

>>> l = ["a","b","b"]
>>> [[x,l.count(x)] for x in set(l)]
[['a', 1], ['b', 2]]
>>> dict((x,l.count(x)) for x in set(l))
{'a': 1, 'b': 2}

Counting all items with Counter()

Alternatively, there's the faster Counter class from the collections library

Counter(l)

Example:

>>> l = ["a","b","b"]
>>> from collections import Counter
>>> Counter(l)
Counter({'b': 2, 'a': 1})

How much faster is Counter?

I checked how much faster Counter is for tallying lists. I tried both methods out with a few values of n and it appears that Counter is faster by a constant factor of approximately 2.

Here is the script I used:

from __future__ import print_function
import timeit

t1=timeit.Timer('Counter(l)', \
                'import random;import string;from collections import Counter;n=1000;l=[random.choice(string.ascii_letters) for x in range(n)]'
                )

t2=timeit.Timer('[[x,l.count(x)] for x in set(l)]',
                'import random;import string;n=1000;l=[random.choice(string.ascii_letters) for x in range(n)]'
                )

print("Counter(): ", t1.repeat(repeat=3,number=10000))
print("count():   ", t2.repeat(repeat=3,number=10000)

And the output:

Counter():  [0.46062711701961234, 0.4022796869976446, 0.3974247490405105]
count():    [7.779430688009597, 7.962715800967999, 8.420845870045014]

Answer 4

Why not using Pandas?

import pandas as pd

l = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'a', 'd', 'a']

# converting the list to a Series and counting the values
my_count = pd.Series(l).value_counts()
my_count

Output:

a    3
d    2
b    1
c    1
dtype: int64

If you are looking for a count of a particular element, say a, try:

my_count['a']

Output:

3

Answer 5

if you want a number of occurrences for the particular element:

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> z = ['blue', 'red', 'blue', 'yellow', 'blue', 'red']
>>> single_occurrences = Counter(z)
>>> print(single_occurrences.get("blue"))
3
>>> print(single_occurrences.values())
dict_values([3, 2, 1])

Answer 6

If you can use pandas, then value_counts is there for rescue.

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 4, 1]
>>> pd.Series(a).value_counts()
1    3
4    2
3    1
2    1
dtype: int64

It automatically sorts the result based on frequency as well.

If you want the result to be in a list of list, do as below

>>> pd.Series(a).value_counts().reset_index().values.tolist()
[[1, 3], [4, 2], [3, 1], [2, 1]]