[FIXED] Best Way to Count Occurences of Each Character in a Large Dataset

Issue

I am trying to count the number of occurrences of each character within a large dateset. For example, if the data was the numpy array ['A', 'AB', 'ABC'] then I would want {'A': 3, 'B': 2, 'C': 1} as the output. I currently have an implementation that looks like this:

char_count = {}
for c in string.printable:
    char_count[c] = np.char.count(data, c).sum()

The issue I am having is that this takes too long for my data. I have ~14,000,000 different strings that I would like to count and this implementation is not efficient for that amount of data. Any help is appreciated!

Solution

Another way.

import collections
c = collections.Counter()
for thing in data:
    c.update(thing)

Same basic advantage - only iterates the data once.

Answered By - wwii