Can you make Counter not write-out “Counter”?

Question

So when I print the Counter (from collections import Counter) to a file I always get this the literal Counter ({\'Foo\': 12})

Is there anyw

Answer 1

You could just pass the Counter to dict:

counter = collections.Counter(...)
counter = dict(counter)

---

In [56]: import collections

In [57]: counter = collections.Counter(['Foo']*12)

In [58]: counter
Out[58]: Counter({'Foo': 12})

In [59]: counter = dict(counter)

In [60]: counter
Out[60]: {'Foo': 12}

---

I rather like JBernardo's idea better, though:

In [66]: import json

In [67]: counter
Out[67]: Counter({'Foo': 12})

In [68]: json.dumps(counter)
Out[68]: '{"Foo": 12}'

That way, you do not lose counter's special methods, like most_common, and you do not require extra temporary memory while Python builds a dict from a Counter.