Python most_common() Function

most_common() function is a method provided by the Counter class in Python's collections module. It returns a list of the n most common elements and their counts from a collection, sorted by frequency. Example:

from collections import Counter

a = ['apple', 'banana', 'apple', 'orange', 'banana', 'apple']

# create a Counter object
counter = Counter(a)

# elements according to the frequency in decreasing order
res = counter.most_common()
print(res)

[('apple', 3), ('banana', 2), ('orange', 1)]

Syntax of most_common()

most_common(n)

Parameters:

• n (optional): An integer specifying how many of the most common elements to retrieve. Defaults to returning all elements.

Returns: A list of tuples containing the n most common elements and their counts, sorted in descending order by frequency.

Examples of most_common()

Example 1: Finding the Most Common Words in a String

from collections import Counter

s = "Ram and Shyam are friends. Also, Ram and Ghanshyam are college friends. All of them Studies from GeeksforGeeks"

res = Counter(s.split()).most_common(3)
print(res)

[('Ram', 2), ('and', 2), ('are', 2)]

Explanation: The function splits the text into words and counts how many times each word appears. The three most common words are returned along with their counts.

Example 2: Counting Character Occurrences

from collections import Counter

a = "abracadabra"

# Get the most common character and its count
res = Counter(string).most_common(1)

print(res)

[('a', 5)]

Explanation: The function counts the occurrence of each character in the string and returns the most common character ('a') along with its frequency (5 times).

Example 3: Identifying Popular Items in a list

from collections import Counter

a = ['apple', 'banana', 'apple', 'orange', 'banana', 'apple']

res = Counter(items).most_common(1)
print(res)

[('apple', 3)]

Explanation: The function counts how many times each item appears in the list and returns the most common item ('apple') with its frequency (3 times).

Related Articles:

• Python collections Counter
• Python tutorial