extract dictionary from Counter object

Question

I want to count the number of times a word occur in a list of sting.

['this is a red ball','this is another red ball']

I wrote the following code

counts = Counter()
for sentence in lines:
    counts.update(word.strip('.,?!"\'').lower() for word in sentence.split())

It gives me a result in the following format

Counter({'': 6, 'red': 2, 'this': 2, ....})

How can I only get the dictionary?

Answer 1

You can just do the following if a dictionary is really what you want.

dict(counts)

Though you will have all the operations in counts variable which you can do in a normal python dictionary because Counter is a subclass of dict.

From Counter docs:

A Counter is a dict subclass for counting hashable objects.