Question

I need to be able to store data, one being a number and one being the number of times it appeared. I have a for loop that calls a method that returns a dictionary:

for x in range(total_holidays):
    t = trial()
    y = y + "\n" + str(x+1) + "," + str(t["brown"]) + "," + str(t["rainbow"]) + "," + str(t["nothing"]) + "," + str(t["days"])
    total += t["days"]
    #print total
    if x%10000 == 0:
        y0.append(y)
        y = ""

Basically I need to count how many times t[‘days’] happens, the number changes almost every time. If you want the full code look here:

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/193846/how-many-trials-would-you-expect-to-give-you-an-accurate-answer

So how would I do this and then I need to print it all out after.

y is text for a csv file, and total is used to calculate the average.

---

As suggested by mgilson should I use this?

from collections import Counter

a = []
for x in range(total_holidays):
    t = trial()
    y = y + "\n" + str(x+1) + "," + str(t["brown"]) + "," + str(t["rainbow"]) + "," + str(t["nothing"]) + "," + str(t["days"])
    total += t["days"]
    a.append(t['days'])
    #print total
    if x%10000 == 0:
        y0.append(y)
        y = ""
z = Counter(a)
print z

Should I have something like that?

Answer 1

What you want is the collections.Counter type, a dict subtype specialized for this kind of task:

import collections
days_occurred = collections.Counter()

for ...:
    t = trial()
    days_occurred[t['days']] += 1

# total is now sum(days_occurred.itervalues())

# you print the counts by iterating over the dict

for days, count in days_occurred.iteritems():
    print "%d: %d" % (days, count)