How can I count the number of each character in a Python string?

Question

I have written this Python program to count the number of each character in a Python string.

def count_chars(s):
    counts = [0] * 65536
    for c in s:
        counts[ord(c)] += 1
    return counts

def print_counts(counts):
    for i, n in enumerate(counts):
        if n > 0:
            print(chr(i), '-', n)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print_counts(count_chars('hello, world \u2615'))

Output:

  - 2
, - 1
d - 1
e - 1
h - 1
l - 3
o - 2
r - 1
w - 1
☕ - 1

Can this program take care of counting the number of any occurrences of any Unicode character? If not, what can be done to ensure that every possible Unicode character is taken care of?

Did you try to see what happens?

Jongware
– Jongware

2015-10-17 19:22:35 +00:00
Commented Oct 17, 2015 at 19:22 — Jongware
– Jongware, Commented Oct 17, 2015 at 19:22

Martijn Pieters · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-17 19:32:24Z

7

Your code only handles characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane; emoticons won't be handled, for example. You could remedy that by just using a dictionary instead of a list with a fixed number of indices, and use the characters as keys.

However, you should just use a collections.Counter() object:

from collections import Counter

counts = Counter(s)

for character, count in counts.most_common():
    print(character, '-', count)

It is, after all, designed for just such use cases.

Demo:

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> s = 'hello, world \u2615 \U0001F60A'
>>> counts = Counter(s)
>>> for character, count in counts.most_common():
...     print(character, '-', count)
...
  - 3
l - 3
o - 2
r - 1
w - 1
e - 1
h - 1
d - 1
☕ - 1
, - 1
😊 - 1

edited Oct 17, 2015 at 19:32

answered Oct 17, 2015 at 19:25

Martijn Pieters

1.1m326 gold badges4.2k silver badges3.4k bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Comments

user11378194 · Accepted Answer · 2019-04-18 10:11:57Z

0

message='alpha beta gamma sudama'
z = list(message)
p = []
for x in range (0,len(z)):
    y=0
    i=0
    count=0
    if z[x] not in p:
        p.append(z[x])
        while i < len(z) :
            if z[x] == z[i]:
                count = count+1
            i = i+1
        print(z[x],count)

answered Apr 18, 2019 at 10:11

user11378194

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How can I count the number of each character in a Python string?

2 Answers 2

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related