On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 3:05 PM, CM <cmpyt...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have to count the number of various two-digit sequences in a list > such as this: > > mylist = [(2,4), (2,4), (3,4), (4,5), (2,1)] # (Here the (2,4) > sequence appears 2 times.) > > and tally up the results, assigning each to a variable.
You can use a tuple as a dictionary key, just like you would a string. So you can count them up directly with a dictionary: count = {} for sequence_tuple in list_of_tuples: count[sequence_tuple] = count.get(sequence_tuple,0) + 1 Also, since this is such a common thing to do, there's a standard library way of doing it: import collections count = collections.Counter(list_of_tuples) This doesn't depend on knowing ahead of time what your elements will be. At the end of it, you can simply iterate over 'count' and get all your counts: for sequence,number in count.items(): print("%d of %r" % (number,sequence)) ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list