I am trying to find the maximum occurrences of a string in a list using Python

Question

I am trying to find the maximum occurrences of a string in a list using Python my code currently is:

def count_occurences(input_string):
    list1 = []
    items = input_string.split(", ")

    for item in items:
        item = item.rstrip()

   
    max=0
    for i in items:
        
        count = input_string.count(i)
        if count > max:
            max = count
    

    for j in items:
        frequency = input_string.count(j)
        if frequency == max:
            list1.append(j)
            list1.append(max)
            

    return list1

Does this answer your question? [How can I count the occurrences of a list item?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2600191/how-can-i-count-the-occurrences-of-a-list-item) — alex, Oct 25 '21 at 08:24
Note: `for item in items: item = item.rstrip()` actually does nothing. It won't alter the list elements. — Green绿色, Oct 25 '21 at 08:31

Agent Biscutt · Answer 1 · 2021-10-25T08:42:14.310

Just one confusion is that your string variable is a string, not a list, which is what you asked about. This is what I came up with:

def count(a):
  dictionary={}
  for x in a:
    try:
      dictionary[x]+=1
    except Exception:
      dictionary[x]=1
  return (dictionary)
string = 'mary, bob, mary, bob, alex, julie'
s=string.split(",")
print(count(s))

You can access the count of each name by assigning it to a variable, and calling it like:

a=count(s)
s["bob"] #returns 2

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 25 '21 at 08:30

Instead of writing your own algorithm, you could simply use the builtin Counter from collections package. This class is basically a dictionary with items as keys and frequencies as values:

from collections import Counter
string = 'mary, bob, mary, bob, alex, julie'
names = [name.strip() for name in string.split(', ')]
frequencies = Counter(names)
max_frequency = max(frequencies.values())
max_frequency_names = [name 
                       for name, frequency in frequencies.items() 
                       if frequency == max_frequency]
print(max_frequency_names)

I am trying to find the maximum occurrences of a string in a list using Python

2 Answers2