count the frequency that a value occurs in a dataframe column

Question

I have a dataset

|category|
cat a
cat b
cat a

I\'d like to be able to return something like (showing unique values and frequency)

Answer 1

Without any libraries, you could do this instead:

def to_frequency_table(data):
    frequencytable = {}
    for key in data:
        if key in frequencytable:
            frequencytable[key] += 1
        else:
            frequencytable[key] = 1
    return frequencytable

Example:

to_frequency_table([1,1,1,1,2,3,4,4])
>>> {1: 4, 2: 1, 3: 1, 4: 2}