[docs] [issue20068] collections.Counter documentation leaves out interesting usecase

[Julian Gindi]

New submission from Julian Gindi:

I think the documentation for collections.Counter can be updated slightly to include an example showing the initialization of a counter object from a list. For example, it explains how to manually iterate through a list and increment the values...

for word in ['red', 'blue', 'red', 'green', 'blue', 'blue']:
...     cnt[word] += 1

I think it is more useful and powerful to do something like this:

cnt = Counter(['red', 'blue', 'red', 'green', 'blue', 'blue'])

where the result would be:

Counter({'blue': 3, 'red': 2, 'green': 1})

Just a thought. I'm curious to see what other people think.

----------
assignee: docs at python
components: Documentation
messages: 206935
nosy: Julian.Gindi, docs at python, rhettinger
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: collections.Counter documentation leaves out interesting usecase
type: enhancement
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.1, Python 3.2, Python 3.3, Python 3.4, Python 3.5

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue20068>
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