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})