Find Frequency of Characters in Python

In this article, we will explore various methods to count the frequency of characters in a given string. One simple method to count frequency of each character is by using a dictionary.

Using Dictionary

The idea is to traverse through each character in the string and keep a count of how many times it appears.

s = "GeeksforGeeks"
freq = {}

for c in s:
    if c in freq:
        freq[c] += 1
    else:
        freq[c] = 1

print(freq)

{'G': 2, 'e': 4, 'k': 2, 's': 2, 'f': 1, 'o': 1, 'r': 1}

Explanation: We use a dictionary freq to store each character as the key and its count as the value. We loop through the string s and check if the character is already in the dictionary. If it is then increase its count by 1. Otherwise, set its frequency to 1.

Let's explore other various methods to find the frequency of each character in String:

Using Counter from collections Library

The collections module has a built-in Counter class to count character frequencies in a string.

from collections import Counter

s = "GeeksforGeeks"

# Count character frequency using Counter
freq = Counter(s)

print(dict(freq))

{'G': 2, 'e': 4, 'k': 2, 's': 2, 'f': 1, 'o': 1, 'r': 1}

Explanation: Counter(s) counts the frequency of each character in s and returns a Counter object which is a dictionary-like collection. To convert back to dictionary we can wrap the freq with dict()

Using Dictionary Comprehension

A dictionary comprehension can also be used to count character frequencies in a concise form.

s = "GeeksforGeeks"

# Count characters using dictionary comprehension
freq = {c: s.count(c) for c in s}

print(freq)

{'G': 2, 'e': 4, 'k': 2, 's': 2, 'f': 1, 'o': 1, 'r': 1}

Explanation: {char: s.count(char) for char in s} creates a dictionary where each character in s is a key and s.count(c) gives its frequency.

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Article Tags :

• Python
• python-string
• Python string-programs

Practice Tags :

• python