How do I get the number of elements in a list (length of a list) in Python?
The len()
function can be used with several different types in Python - both built-in types and library types. For example:
>>> len([1, 2, 3])
3
How do I count the occurrences of a list item?
If you only want a single item's count, use the count
method:
>>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 4, 1].count(1)
3
Important: this is very slow if you are counting multiple different items
Each count
call goes over the entire list of n
elements. Calling count
in a loop n
times means n * n
total checks, which can be catastrophic for performance.
If you want to count multiple items, use Counter
, which only does n
total checks.
Finding the index of an item in a list
>>> ["foo", "bar", "baz"].index("bar")
1
Reference: Data Structures > More on Lists
Caveats follow
Note that while this is perhaps the cleanest way to answer the question as asked, index
is a rather weak component of the list
API, and I can't remember the last time I used it in anger. It's been pointed out to me in the comments that because this answer is heavily referenced, it should be made more complete. Some caveats about list.index
follow. It is probably worth initially taking a look at the documentation for it:
list.index(x[, start[, end]])
Return zero-based index in the list of the first item whose value is equal to x. Raises a
ValueError
if there is no such item.The optional arguments start and end are interpreted as in the slice notation and are used to limit the search to a particular subsequence of the list. The returned index is computed relative to the beginning of the full sequence rather than the start argument.
Linear time-complexity in list length
An index
call checks every element of the list in order, until it finds a match. If your list is long, and you don't know roughly where in the list it occurs, this search could become a bottleneck. In that case, you should consider a different data structure. Note that if you know roughly where to find the match, you can give index
a hint. For instance, in this snippet, l.index(999_999, 999_990, 1_000_000)
is roughly five orders of magnitude faster than straight l.index(999_999)
, because the former only has to search 10 entries, while the latter searches a million:
>>> import timeit
>>> timeit.timeit('l.index(999_999)', setup='l = list(range(0, 1_000_000))', number=1000)
9.356267921015387
>>> timeit.timeit('l.index(999_999, 999_990, 1_000_000)', setup='l = list(range(0, 1_000_000))', number=1000)
0.0004404920036904514
Only returns the index of the first match to its argument
A call to index
searches through the list in order until it finds a match, and stops there. If you expect to need indices of more matches, you should use a list comprehension, or generator expression.
>>> [1, 1].index(1)
0
>>> [i for i, e in enumerate([1, 2, 1]) if e == 1]
[0, 2]
>>> g = (i for i, e in enumerate([1, 2, 1]) if e == 1)
>>> next(g)
0
>>> next(g)
2
Most places where I once would have used index
, I now use a list comprehension or generator expression because they're more generalizable. So if you're considering reaching for index
, take a look at these excellent Python features.
Throws if element not present in list
A call to index
results in a ValueError
if the item's not present.
>>> [1, 1].index(2)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: 2 is not in list
If the item might not be present in the list, you should either
- Check for it first with
item in my_list
(clean, readable approach), or - Wrap the
index
call in atry/except
block which catchesValueError
(probably faster, at least when the list to search is long, and the item is usually present.)
How to count the frequency of the elements in an unordered list?
If the list is sorted, you can use groupby
from the itertools
standard library (if it isn't, you can just sort it first, although this takes O(n lg n) time):
from itertools import groupby
a = [5, 1, 2, 2, 4, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 5, 2]
[len(list(group)) for key, group in groupby(sorted(a))]
Output:
[4, 4, 2, 1, 2]
Counting array elements in Python
The method len() returns the number of elements in the list.
Syntax:
len(myArray)
Eg:
myArray = [1, 2, 3]
len(myArray)
Output:
3
Python: count repeated elements in the list
You can do that using count
:
my_dict = {i:MyList.count(i) for i in MyList}
>>> print my_dict #or print(my_dict) in python-3.x
{'a': 3, 'c': 3, 'b': 1}
Or using collections.Counter
:
from collections import Counter
a = dict(Counter(MyList))
>>> print a #or print(a) in python-3.x
{'a': 3, 'c': 3, 'b': 1}
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