How can I use the Counter class from the collections module in Python for advanced tasks?

How can I use the Counter class from the collections module in Python for advanced tasks?

The Counter class is great for counting hashable objects. You can use it for tasks like finding the most common elements in a list.

Can you show me an example of finding the most common elements?

Sure! Here's a simple example:

from collections import Counter

my_list = ['apple', 'banana', 'apple', 'orange', 'banana', 'banana']
count = Counter(my_list)
print(count.most_common(2))  # Output: [('banana', 3), ('apple', 2)]

What if I want to count elements in a string?

You can do that too! Just pass the string to Counter directly:

from collections import Counter

my_string = 'hello world'
count = Counter(my_string)
print(count)

How can I combine two Counter objects?

You can use the + operator to combine them. For example:

from collections import Counter

counter1 = Counter('abc')
counter2 = Counter('bcd')
combined = counter1 + counter2
print(combined)  # Output: Counter({'b': 2, 'c': 2, 'a': 1, 'd': 1})