Count python list item occurrences
Last Updated on July 17, 2021 by Editorial Team
Author(s): Vivek Chaudhary
Programming
From a list of integers, count the occurrence of each element and add items and count as a sub-list.

Input list: inp = [7, 9, 7, 4, 3, 5, 3, 6, 9, 3]
Output list: out= [[7, 2], [9, 2], [4, 1], [3, 3], [5, 1], [6, 1]]
#Note: where 7 is list item and 2 is the count of occurrence
Using nested loops
def count_items(inp):
for i in range(0, len(inp)):
a = 0
row =[]
if i not in l:
for j in range(0, len(inp)):
if inp[i]== inp[j]:
a = a + 1
row.append(inp[i])
row.append(a)
l.append(row)
for j in l:
if j not in out:
out.append(j)
return out
Call the function and check the output:
#call func()
inp = [7, 9, 7, 4, 3, 5, 3, 6, 9, 3]
l = []
out = []
print(count_items(inp))
Output: [[7, 2], [9, 2], [4, 1], [3, 3], [5, 1], [6, 1]]
Using count() method
def count_items(inp):
for i in inp:
row =[]
ct = 0
ct = inp.count(i)
row.append(i)
row.append(ct)
l.append(row)
for j in l:
if j not in out:
out.append(j)
return out
Call the function and check the output:
#call func()
inp = [7, 9, 7, 4, 3, 5, 3, 6, 9, 3]
l = []
out = []
print(count_items(inp))
Output: [[7, 2], [9, 2], [4, 1], [3, 3], [5, 1], [6, 1]]
Using counter() method
from collections import Counter
def count_items(inp):
coll = Counter(inp)
out = []
for key,val in coll.items():
out.append([key,val])
return out
Call the function and check the output:
#call func()
inp = [7, 9, 7, 4, 3, 5, 3, 6, 9, 3]
print(count_items(inp))
Output: [[7, 2], [9, 2], [4, 1], [3, 3], [5, 1], [6, 1]]
To summarize, we covered several ways to count occurrences of list items as below:
- count() method
- nested for loops
- collections library counter() method
That’s all with count occurrences of list items.
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