Exploring Counter and defaultdict in python collections

I needed to count frequency of items in a list. Given a list like below

some_data = ['a','b','v','c','l','c']

The ugly way was using the dictionary
[gist id=”5520902″]
The end result is
{'a': 1, 'c': 2, 'b': 1, 'l': 1, 'v': 1}

But we can use Counter which is much cleaner
[gist id=”5520864″]

Result –

Counter({'c': 2, 'a': 1, 'b': 1, 'l': 1, 'v': 1})

But, more elegant, as suggested in comments by Andy
[gist id=5567806]

And, another way is using defaultdict

[gist id=5520913]

Result

defaultdict(, {'a': 1, 'c': 2, 'b': 1, 'l': 1, 'v': 1})

You can read more here http://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html