Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Implementing Counters

The Counter collection is another dictionary-like object that counts hashable objects. Like dictionaries, Counters are unordered mappings of elements (stored as keys) and their respective quantities (stored as values). Value counts are stored as integer values, but can be any value, including zero and negative numbers.

Technically, Counter is a subclass of the dictionary class, so it has access to all the traditional dictionary methods. In addition, it has the following special methods available to it:

• elements(): It returns an iterator object over the key elements, repeating each key until its quantity value is reached. Elements are printed in random order and, if an element's count is less than one, it will not be ...