Pythonic way to iterate over a collections.Counter() instance in descending order?

Question

In Python 2.7, I want to iterate over a collections.Counter instance in descending count order.

>>> import collections
>>> c = co         


        

Answer 1

You can iterate over c.most_common() to get the items in the desired order. See also the documentation of Counter.most_common().

Example:

>>> c = collections.Counter(a=1, b=999)
>>> c.most_common()
[('b', 999), ('a', 1)]