Count the Number of Times an Item Appears in a List – Python

Here are 3 ways to count the number of times an item appears in a list in Python:

(1) Using count() to count a specific item. For example, let’s count the number of times ‘mm’ appears in a list:

my_list = ['mm', 'bb', 'cc', 'mm', 'mm', 'cc']

count_item = my_list.count('mm')

print(count_item)

The result is 3 times:

3

(2) Using Counter to count a specific item. Let’s again count the number of times ‘mm’ appears in a list:

from collections import Counter

my_list = ['mm', 'bb', 'cc', 'mm', 'mm', 'cc']

count_all = Counter(my_list)
count_item = count_all.get('mm')

print(count_item)

The result is the same:

3

(3) Using Counter to count the number of times each item appears in a list:

from collections import Counter

my_list = ['mm', 'bb', 'cc', 'mm', 'mm', 'cc']

count_all = Counter(my_list)

print(count_all)

Here you’ll get the number of times that each item appears in a list:

Counter({'mm': 3, 'cc': 2, 'bb': 1})