Python most_common() Function

The most_common() function is a method provided by the Counter class in Python’s collections module. It returns a list of the n most common elements and their counts from a collection, sorted by frequency.

Example:

Here, we are using the most_common() function to arrange elements according to the frequency in decreasing order.

Python3

from collections import Counter

# Sample data
data = ['apple', 'banana', 'apple', 'orange', 'banana', 'apple']

# Create a Counter object
counter = Counter(data)

# elements according to the frequency in decreasing order
most_common_elements = counter.most_common()

print(most_common_elements)

Output

[('apple', 3), ('banana', 2), ('orange', 1)]

Syntax of Python most_common() Function

most_common(n)

Parameters:

• n: An integer specifying the number of most common elements to retrieve.

Returns:

A list of tuples containing the n most common elements and their counts, sorted in descending order by frequency.

Python most_common() Function Examples

Below are some of the commonly used examples of Python most_common() Function of collections module in Python:

Example 1: Analyzing Word Frequency

In this example, we use most_common() to find the three most common words in a piece of text.

Python3

from collections import Counter

# Sample text
text = "Ram and Shyam are friends. Also, Ram and Ghanshyam are college friends. All of them Studies from GeeksforGeeks"

# Get the three most common words
common_words = Counter(text.split()).most_common(3)

print(common_words)

Output

[('Ram', 2), ('and', 2), ('are', 2)]

Example 2: Counting Character Occurrences

Here, we utilize most_common() to identify the most common character and its count in a string.

Python3

from collections import Counter

# Sample string
string = "abracadabra"

# Get the most common character and its count
common_char = Counter(string).most_common(1)

print(common_char)

Output

[('a', 5)]

Example 3: Identifying Popular Items

This example demonstrates using most_common() to determine the most popular item in a list along with its count.

Python3

from collections import Counter

# Sample data
items = ['apple', 'banana', 'apple', 'orange', 'banana', 'apple']

# Get the most common item and its count
popular_item = Counter(items).most_common(1)

print(popular_item)

Output

[('apple', 3)]