How to make a histogram from a list of strings in Python?

Question

I have a list of strings:

a = [\'a\', \'a\', \'a\', \'a\', \'b\', \'b\', \'c\', \'c\', \'c\', \'d\', \'e\', \'e\', \'e\', \'e\', \'e\']

I w

Answer 1

Very easy with Pandas.

import pandas
from collections import Counter
a = ['a', 'a', 'a', 'a', 'b', 'b', 'c', 'c', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'e']
letter_counts = Counter(a)
df = pandas.DataFrame.from_dict(letter_counts, orient='index')
df.plot(kind='bar')

Notice that Counter is making a frequency count, so our plot type is 'bar' not 'hist'.