Example 1: collections.counter in python
>>> from collections import Counter
>>>
>>> myList = [1,1,2,3,4,5,3,2,3,4,2,1,2,3]
>>> print Counter(myList)
Counter({2: 4, 3: 4, 1: 3, 4: 2, 5: 1})
>>>
>>> print Counter(myList).items()
[(1, 3), (2, 4), (3, 4), (4, 2), (5, 1)]
>>>
>>> print Counter(myList).keys()
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
>>>
>>> print Counter(myList).values()
[3, 4, 4, 2, 1]
Example 2: python counter
>>>
>>> cnt = Counter()
>>> for word in ['red', 'blue', 'red', 'green', 'blue', 'blue']:
... cnt[word] += 1
>>> cnt
Counter({'blue': 3, 'red': 2, 'green': 1})
>>>
>>> import re
>>> words = re.findall(r'\w+', open('hamlet.txt').read().lower())
>>> Counter(words).most_common(10)
[('the', 1143), ('and', 966), ('to', 762), ('of', 669), ('i', 631),
('you', 554), ('a', 546), ('my', 514), ('hamlet', 471), ('in', 451)]