How to sort text by how much it is repeated?

Question

I have a text file abc.txt, It contains the following lines:

a
a
b
c
c
c
d
d

I want to sort this list by how much each word is repeated in descending order, in this case it would be:

c - 3 times
a - 2 times
d - 2 times
b - 1 time

So far, I have read the text file, tried to sort the list but failed using Python... Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

this code:

• read lines from file
• count them using collections.Counter which doing the sort for us as well
• show them with the format you requested

from collections import Counter


def main():
    file_path = 'abc.txt'

    with open(file_path, 'r') as f:
        lines = f.read().split('\n')

    result = Counter(lines)

    for_show = '\n'.join(f'{key}: {value} item{"s" if value > 1 else ""}' for key, value in result.most_common())

    print(for_show)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()