Python Lists - Finding Number of Times a String Occurs

Question

How would I find how many times each string appears in my list?

Say I have the word:

\"General Store\"

that is in my list like 20 t

Answer 1

If you're willing to use the pandas library, this one is really quick:

import pandas as pd 

my_list = lis=["General Store","General Store","General Store","Mall","Mall","Mall","Mall","Mall","Mall","Ice Cream Van"]
pd.Series(my_list).value_counts()

Answer 2

While the other answers (using list.count) do work, they can be prohibitively slow on large lists.

Consider using collections.Counter, as describe in http://docs.python.org/library/collections.html

Example:

>>> # Tally occurrences of words in a list
>>> cnt = Counter()
>>> for word in ['red', 'blue', 'red', 'green', 'blue', 'blue']:
...     cnt[word] += 1
>>> cnt
Counter({'blue': 3, 'red': 2, 'green': 1})