counting element occurrences in nested lists

Question

This is probably quite a straightforward question, but I can\'t find an answer elsewhere so I\'ll ask. What is the best way to find the number of times an element appears in

Answer 1

Use a nested generator expression:

Counter(x for sublist in my_list for x in sublist)

To count the items in the first position, a different generator expression gets that item for counting:

Counter(sublist[0] for sublist in my_list)

Demo:

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> my_list=[['a','b','c','d'],['a','b','z','d'],['a','c','f','e'],['d','w','f','a']]
>>> Counter(x for sublist in my_list for x in sublist)
Counter({'a': 4, 'd': 3, 'c': 2, 'b': 2, 'f': 2, 'e': 1, 'w': 1, 'z': 1})
>>> Counter(sublist[0] for sublist in my_list)
Counter({'a': 3, 'd': 1})

Answer 2

>>> from collections import defaultdict, Counter
>>> my_list = [['a', 'b', 'c', 'd'], ['a', 'b', 'z', 'd'], ['a', 'c', 'f', 'e'], ['d', 'w', 'f', 'a']]
>>> pos_count = defaultdict(Counter)
>>> for sublist in my_list:
        for i, c in enumerate(sublist):
            pos_count[c][i] += 1


>>> pos_count['a'][0]
3
>>> pos_count['b'][1]
2

Answer 3

from collections import Counter
from itertools import chain

counts = Counter(chain.from_iterable(my_list))

or generate a new list and use count:

new_list = list(chain.from_iterable(my_list))
print new_list.count(whatever)

If you wanted how many times 'a' is the first, then something like:

sum(1 for el in my_list if el[0] is a) # or == a if object identity is not required