Using a dictionary to count the items in a list [duplicate]

Solution 1:

in 2.7 and 3.1 there is special Counter dict for this purpose.

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> Counter(['apple','red','apple','red','red','pear'])
Counter({'red': 3, 'apple': 2, 'pear': 1})

I like:

counts = dict()
for i in items:
  counts[i] = counts.get(i, 0) + 1

.get allows you to specify a default value if the key does not exist.

Simply use list property count\

i = ['apple','red','apple','red','red','pear']
d = {x:i.count(x) for x in i}
print d

output :

{'pear': 1, 'apple': 2, 'red': 3}