return the top n most frequently occurring chars and their respective counts in python

Question

how to return the top n most frequently occurring chars and their respective counts # e.g \'aaaaaabbbbcccc\', 2 should return [(\'a\', 6), (\'b\'

Answer 1

A little harder, but also works:

text = "abbbaaaa"

dict = {}
for lines in text:
    for char in lines:
        dict[char] = dict.get(char, 0) + 1

print dict