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Counters in Python | Set 1 (Initialization and Updation)

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The counter is a container included in the collections module. Now you all must be wondering what is a container. Don’t worry first let’s discuss the container.

What is Container?

Containers are objects that hold objects. They provide a way to access the contained objects and iterate over them. Examples of built-in containers are Tuples, lists, and dictionaries. Others are included in the Collections module.
A Counter is a subclass of dict. Therefore it is an unordered collection where elements and their respective count are stored as a dictionary. This is equivalent to a bag or multiset of other languages.

Syntax 

class collections.Counter([iterable-or-mapping])

Initialization: 

The constructor of the counter can be called in any one of the following ways:

  • With a sequence of items
  • With a dictionary containing keys and counts
  • With keyword arguments mapping string names to counts

Initializing a Counter

Python3




# A Python program to show different ways to create
# Counter
from collections import Counter
 
# With sequence of items
print(Counter(['B','B','A','B','C','A','B','B','A','C']))
 
# with dictionary
print(Counter({'A':3, 'B':5, 'C':2}))
 
# with keyword arguments
print(Counter(A=3, B=5, C=2))


Output:

Counter({'B': 5, 'A': 3, 'C': 2})
Counter({'B': 5, 'A': 3, 'C': 2})
Counter({'B': 5, 'A': 3, 'C': 2})

Updation in counters

We can also create an empty counter in the following manner : 

coun = collections.Counter()

And can be updated via the update() method. The syntax for the same : 

coun.update(Data)

Python3




# A Python program to demonstrate update()
from collections import Counter
coun = Counter()
 
coun.update([1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2])
print(coun)
 
coun.update([1, 2, 4])
print(coun)


Output:

Counter({1: 4, 2: 3, 3: 1})
Counter({1: 5, 2: 4, 3: 1, 4: 1}

Subtract two Counters

Data can be provided in any of the three ways as mentioned in initialization and the counter’s data will be increased not replaced.Counts can be zero or negative also.

Python3




# Python program to demonstrate that counts in
# Counter can be 0 and negative
from collections import Counter
 
c1 = Counter(A=4,  B=3, C=10)
c2 = Counter(A=10, B=3, C=4)
 
c1.subtract(c2)
print(c1)


Output:

 Counter({'c': 6, 'B': 0, 'A': -6})

Distinct Count in the list

We can use Counter to count distinct elements of a list or other collections. 

Python3




# An example program where different list items are
# counted using counter
from collections import Counter
 
# Create a list
z = ['blue', 'red', 'blue', 'yellow', 'blue', 'red']
 
# Count distinct elements and print Counter aobject
print(Counter(z))


Output:

Counter({'blue': 3, 'red': 2, 'yellow': 1})

Printing Counter Values

We can also access all the keys and values of a counter using the keys(), values(), and items() methods. These methods return views of the keys, values, and key-value pairs in the counter, respectively. 

Python3




from collections import Counter
my_counter = Counter('abracadabra')
print(my_counter.keys())
print(my_counter.values())
print(my_counter.items())


Output:

dict_keys(['a', 'b', 'r', 'c', 'd'])
dict_values([5, 2, 2, 1, 1])
dict_items([('a', 5), ('b', 2), ('r', 2), ('c', 1), ('d', 1)])

If you want to learn more about accessing counters in Python, the article  (Accessing Counters) is a great resource.



Last Updated : 26 May, 2023
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