Source: 📖 Python Cookbook ch1.12 p20

Using collections.Counter to find most common items

The Counter object from the collections library is great for finding the most common item (or items) from a sequence. It has a built-in method—most_common() for just this purpose.

from collections import Counter


my_list = ['one', 'two', 'two', 'two', 'three', 'three']
item_counts = Counter(my_list)
top_two = item_counts.most_common(2)	# [('two', 3), ('three', 2)]

See also:

• collections.Counter features