How to count how many times a word appears in a list in python

Question

I have the following list in python

texts = [
    ["great", "even", "for", "the", "non", "runner", "this", "sound",
     "track", "was", "brilliant"],
    ["cannot", "recommend", "as", "a", "former", "comrade", "i", "did",
     "not", "want", "to", "have", "to", "do", "this"]
]

and I want to go through the list and count how often each word appears in it.

I have tried counting the individual words using length() and I get a 2 as a result which means it does not work.

Is there any way I can count how often a word appears in a list as I intend storing the counted word in a new list and it's frequency in another list.

Thanks in advance

We won't know how to make the problem go away in your existing code base without seeing your original code. Please post your [mcve](//stackoverflow.com/help/mcve), and fully explain what needs to be modified. Explain the problem, and what output should be produced for this input. — Patrick Artner, Jan 06 '19 at 14:14
[answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/5828150/3620003) is in the duplicate. — timgeb, Jan 06 '19 at 14:17

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 06 '19 at 14:14

First thing to note is probably that texts is a nested list, which is also why you get 2 for len(texts) since texts contains 2 sublists.

If you want to iterate over the individual words, you need to iterate over the sublists and then over the words inside the sublists. Luckily, Python's list comprehensions can be nested:

[word for words in texts for word in words]

As for the counting: The standard library has a dictionary class for exactly such purpose: collections.Counter:

word_counts = collections.Counter(word for words in texts for word in words)

This will give you a dictionary mapping individual words to their occurrence count.

ramazan polat · Answer 2 · 2019-01-06T17:01:16.623

0

You can use Counter for this.

texts = [
    ["great", "even", "for", "the", "non", "runner", "this", "sound",
      "track", "was", "brilliant"],
    ["cannot", "recommend", "as", "a", "former", "comrade", "i", "did",
      "not", "want", "to", "have", "to", "do", "this"]
]

for text in texts:
    cnt = Counter()
    for word in text:
        cnt[word] += 1
    print(cnt)

edited Jan 06 '19 at 17:01

answered Jan 06 '19 at 14:14

ramazan polat

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Note that `texts` is a nested list. – dhke Jan 06 '19 at 14:14

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 06 '19 at 14:15

0

One liner:

from collections import Counter
from itertools import chain

texts = [["a", "b"], ["a", "c"]]

words_count = Counter(chain(*texts))
print(words_count)

>> Counter({'a': 2, 'b': 1, 'c': 1})

answered Jan 06 '19 at 14:15

Aaron_ab

3,450
3
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score -1 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 06 '19 at 14:16

You can count the words with Counter:

from collections import Counter

texts = [["great", "even", "for", "the", "non", "runner", "this", "sound","track", "was", "brilliant"],
         ["cannot", "recommend", "as", "a", "former", "comrade", "i", "did", "not", "want", "to", "have", "to", "do", "this"]]

for text in texts:
    print(Counter(text))

# Counter({'great': 1, 'even': 1, 'for': 1, 'the': 1, 'non': 1, 'runner': 1, 'this': 1, 'sound': 1, 'track': 1, 'was': 1, 'brilliant': 1})
# Counter({'to': 2, 'cannot': 1, 'recommend': 1, 'as': 1, 'a': 1, 'former': 1, 'comrade': 1, 'i': 1, 'did': 1, 'not': 1, 'want': 1, 'have': 1, 'do': 1, 'this': 1})

Source: How do I count unique values inside a list

How to count how many times a word appears in a list in python

4 Answers4