In python, how do I take the highest occurrence of something in a list, and sort it that way?

Question

[3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 2]

Would be:

[ (3, 3), (4, 2), (2, 1) ]

The output should be sorted by highest count first to lowest count. In this case, 3 to 2 to 1.

Answer 1

You can use a Counter in Python 2.7+ (this recipe works on 2.5+):

from collections import Counter
print Counter([3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 2]).most_common()
# [(3, 3), (4, 2), (2, 1)]