Question

I have a list of dictionaries.
Each dictionary has a colour attribute. For example:

{'att1':value1, 'att2': value2, 'colour': 'Red'}

The colou attribute is from a list of 15 maxium colours.

I have over a thousand of these dictionaries in the list. I need to find out what is the popular colour and how many instances of it there are? Simiilarly I need the second most popular colour, the number of instances of it, the third most, fourth most etc…

Can some fancy pythonic syntax help me out?

Answer 1

from collections import defaultdict
colours = defaultdict(int)
for item in mylist:
   colours[item["colour"]] +=1

gives you a defaultdict with all the colours and their respective number. Displaying those in a sorted fashion is trivial.