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

As @notconfusing pointed above this can be solved with Pandas and Counter. If for any reason you need to not use Pandas you can get by with only matplotlib using the function in the following code:

from collections import Counter
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

a = ['a', 'a', 'a', 'a', 'b', 'b', 'c', 'c', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'e']
letter_counts = Counter(a)

def plot_bar_from_counter(counter, ax=None):
    """"
    This function creates a bar plot from a counter.

    :param counter: This is a counter object, a dictionary with the item as the key
     and the frequency as the value
    :param ax: an axis of matplotlib
    :return: the axis wit the object in it
    """

    if ax is None:
        fig = plt.figure()
        ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

    frequencies = counter.values()
    names = counter.keys()

    x_coordinates = np.arange(len(counter))
    ax.bar(x_coordinates, frequencies, align='center')

    ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(plt.FixedLocator(x_coordinates))
    ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(plt.FixedFormatter(names))

    return ax

plot_bar_from_counter(letter_counts)
plt.show()

Which will produce