Counting each letter's frequency in a string

Question

This is a question from pyschools.

I did get it right, but I\'m guessing that there would be a simpler method. Is this the simplest way to do this?

Answer 1

>>> import collections
>>> print collections.Counter("google")
Counter({'o': 2, 'g': 2, 'e': 1, 'l': 1})

Answer 2

In 2.7+:

import collections
letters = collections.Counter('google')

Earlier (2.5+, that's ancient by now):

import collections
letters = collections.defaultdict(int)
for letter in word:
    letters[letter] += 1