Question

Given an unordered list of values like

a = [5, 1, 2, 2, 4, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 5, 2]

How can I get the frequency of each value that appears in the list, like so?

# `a` has 4 instances of `1`, 4 of `2`, 2 of `3`, 1 of `4,` 2 of `5`
b = [4, 4, 2, 1, 2] # expected output

Answer 1

If the list is sorted, you can use groupby from the itertools standard library (if it isn’t, you can just sort it first, although this takes O(n lg n) time):

from itertools import groupby

a = [5, 1, 2, 2, 4, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 5, 2]
[len(list(group)) for key, group in groupby(sorted(a))]

Output:

[4, 4, 2, 1, 2]