How to count the frequency of the elements in an unordered list?

In Python 2.7 (or newer), you can use collections.Counter:

>>> import collections
>>> a = [5, 1, 2, 2, 4, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 5, 2]
>>> counter = collections.Counter(a)
>>> counter
Counter({1: 4, 2: 4, 5: 2, 3: 2, 4: 1})
>>> counter.values()
dict_values([2, 4, 4, 1, 2])
>>> counter.keys()
dict_keys([5, 1, 2, 4, 3])
>>> counter.most_common(3)
[(1, 4), (2, 4), (5, 2)]
>>> dict(counter)
{5: 2, 1: 4, 2: 4, 4: 1, 3: 2}
>>> # Get the counts in order matching the original specification,
>>> # by iterating over keys in sorted order
>>> [counter[x] for x in sorted(counter.keys())]
[4, 4, 2, 1, 2]

If you are using Python 2.6 or older, you can download an implementation here.

If the list is sorted, you can use groupby from the itertools standard library (if it isn't, you can just sort it first, although this takes O(n lg n) time):

from itertools import groupby

a = [5, 1, 2, 2, 4, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 5, 2]
[len(list(group)) for key, group in groupby(sorted(a))]

Output:

[4, 4, 2, 1, 2]

Count the number of appearances manually by iterating through the list and counting them up, using a collections.defaultdict to track what has been seen so far:

from collections import defaultdict

appearances = defaultdict(int)

for curr in a:
    appearances[curr] += 1

In Python 2.7+, you could use collections.Counter to count items

>>> a = [1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,3,3,4,5,5]
>>>
>>> from collections import Counter
>>> c=Counter(a)
>>>
>>> c.values()
[4, 4, 2, 1, 2]
>>>
>>> c.keys()
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]