How to check how many times an element exists in a list

Question

I have a list like this:

[5,6,7,2,4,8,5,2,3]

and I want to check how many times each element exists in this list.

what is the best way to do it in Python?

Answer 1

The count() method counts the number of times an object appears in a list:

a = [5,6,7,2,4,8,5,2,3]
print a.count(5)  # prints 2

But if you're interested in the total of every object in the list, you could use the following code:

counts = {}
for n in a:
    counts[n] = counts.get(n, 0) + 1
print counts

Answer 2

You can use collections.Counter

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> Counter([5,6,7,2,4,8,5,2,3])
Counter({2: 2, 5: 2, 3: 1, 4: 1, 6: 1, 7: 1, 8: 1}