Python – How to Count the Occurrences of a List Item

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Given a single item, how do I count occurrences of it in a list, in Python?

A related but different problem is counting occurrences of each different element in a collection, getting a dictionary or list as a histogram result instead of a single integer. For that problem, see Using a dictionary to count the items in a list.

Best Answer

If you only want a single item's count, use the count method:

>>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 4, 1].count(1)
3

Important: this is very slow if you are counting multiple different items

Each count call goes over the entire list of n elements. Calling count in a loop n times means n * n total checks, which can be catastrophic for performance.

If you want to count multiple items, use Counter, which only does n total checks.

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