Question

So I have a list of strings:

list1 = ["1thing", "2thing", "3thing", "1thing"]

and I want to find out how many times each one is in the list. The thing is, I only want to compare the first couple of characters because I know that if the first, say 3 characters are the same, then the whole string is the same. I was thinking that I could modify the built in list.count(x) method, or I could override the __eq__ operator but I’m not sure how to do either of those.

Answer 1

Use a generator to extract the first couple of characters, and use the builtin collections.Counter class on that:

Counter(item[:2] for item in list1)