How do I count the values from a pandas column which is a list of strings?

Question

I have a dataframe column which is a list of strings:

df[\'colors\']

0              [\'blue\',\'green\',\'brown\']
1              []
2              [\'green\         


        

Answer 1

You can use Counter from the collections module:

import pandas as pd
from collections import Counter
from  itertools import chain

df = pd.DataFrame({'colors':[['blue','green','brown'],
                             [],
                             ['green','red','blue'],
                             ['purple'],
                             ['brown']]})

df = pd.Series(Counter(chain(*df.colors)))

print (df)

Output:

blue      2
green     2
brown     2
red       1
purple    1
dtype: int64