Sum all values of a counter in Python 2

Question

I have a counter from the collections module. What is the best way of summing all of the counts?

For example, I have:

 my_counter = Counter({'a': 2, 'b': 2, 'c': 2, 'd': 1})

and would like to get the value 7 returned. As far as I can tell, the function sum is for adding multiple counters together.

Answer 1

Since your question is about Python 2.7, you should use something like this

sum(my_counter.itervalues())

which on Python 3.x is effectively equivalent to

sum(my_counter.values())

In both cases you evaluate the sum lazily and avoid expensive intermediate data structures. Beware of using the Python 3.x variant on Py 2.x, because in the latter case my_counter.values() calculates an entire list of counts and stores it in memory before calculating the sum.

Answer 2

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> sum(Counter({'a': 2, 'b': 2, 'c': 2, 'd': 1}).values())
7

Common patterns for working with Counter objects: sum(c.values())
# total of all counts

Source: https://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html

Answer 3

c = Counter({'a': 2, 'b': 2, 'c': 2, 'd': 1})
len( list(c.elements()) )

Answer 4

from here:

from collections import Counter
c = Counter([1,2,3,4,5,1,2,1,6])
sum(c.values())