Counting the amount of occurrences in a list of tuples

Question

I am fairly new to python, but I haven\'t been able to find a solution to my problem anywhere.

I want to count the occurrences of a string inside a list of tuples.

Answer 1

Maybe collections.Counter could solve your problem:

from collections import Counter
Counter(elem[0] for elem in list1)

returns

Counter({'12392': 2, '7862': 1})

It is fast since it iterates over your list just once. You iterate over entries and then try to get a count of these entries within your list. That cannot be done with .count, but might be done as follows:

for entry in list1:
    print sum(1 for elem in list1 if elem[0] == entry[0])

But seriously, have a look at collections.Counter.

EDIT: I actually need the total amount of entries which has a value more than 1.

You can still use the Counter:

c = Counter(elem[0] for elem in list1)
sum(v for k, v in c.iteritems() if v > 1)

returns 2, i.e. the sum of counts that are higher than 1.