How do I count unique values inside a list

Question

So I'm trying to make this program that will ask the user for input and store the values in an array / list.
Then when a blank line is entered it will tell the user how many of those values are unique.
I'm building this for real life reasons and not as a problem set.

enter: happy enter: rofl enter: happy enter: mpg8 enter: Cpp enter: Cpp enter: There are 4 unique words! 

My code is as follows:

# ask for input ipta = raw_input("Word: ")  # create list  uniquewords = []  counter = 0 uniquewords.append(ipta)  a = 0   # loop thingy # while loop to ask for input and append in list while ipta:    ipta = raw_input("Word: ")   new_words.append(input1)   counter = counter + 1  for p in uniquewords: 

..and that's about all I've gotten so far.
I'm not sure how to count the unique number of words in a list?
If someone can post the solution so I can learn from it, or at least show me how it would be great, thanks!

Answer 1

In addition, use collections.Counter to refactor your code:

from collections import Counter  words = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'a']  Counter(words).keys() # equals to list(set(words)) Counter(words).values() # counts the elements' frequency 

Output:

['a', 'c', 'b'] [2, 1, 1] 

Answer 2

You can use a set to remove duplicates, and then the len function to count the elements in the set:

len(set(new_words))