Best way to turn word list into frequency dict

Question

What\'s the best way to convert a list/tuple into a dict where the keys are the distinct values of the list and the values are the the frequencies of those distinct values?<

Answer 1

I decided to go ahead and test the versions suggested, I found the collections.Counter as suggested by Jacob Gabrielson to be the fastest, followed by the defaultdict version by SLott.

Here are my codes :

from collections import defaultdict
from collections import Counter

import random

# using default dict
def counter_default_dict(list):
    count=defaultdict(int)
    for i in list:
        count[i]+=1
    return count

# using normal dict
def counter_dict(list):
    count={}
    for i in list:
        count.update({i:count.get(i,0)+1})
    return count

# using count and dict
def counter_count(list):
    count={i:list.count(i) for i in set(list)}
    return count

# using count and dict
def counter_counter(list):
    count = Counter(list)
    return count

list=sorted([random.randint(0,250) for i in range(300)])


if __name__=='__main__':
    from timeit import timeit
    print("collections.Defaultdict ",timeit("counter_default_dict(list)", setup="from __main__ import counter_default_dict,list", number=1000))
    print("Dict",timeit("counter_dict(list)",setup="from __main__ import counter_dict,list",number=1000))
    print("list.count ",timeit("counter_count(list)", setup="from __main__ import counter_count,list", number=1000))
    print("collections.Counter.count ",timeit("counter_counter(list)", setup="from __main__ import counter_counter,list", number=1000))

And my results:

collections.Defaultdict 
0.06787874956330614
Dict
 0.15979115872995675
list.count 
 1.199258431219126
collections.Counter.count
 0.025896202538920665

Do let me know how I can improve the analysis.