Counter is a container included in the collections module. Now you all must be wondering what is a container. Don’t worry first let’s discuss about the container.

What is Container?

Containers are objects that hold objects. They provide a way to access the contained objects and iterate over them. Examples of built in containers are Tuple, list, and dictionary. Others are included in Collections module.

A Counter is a subclass of dict. Therefore it is an unordered collection where elements and their respective count are stored as a dictionary. This is equivalent to a bag or multiset of other languages.

Syntax :

class collections.Counter([iterable-or-mapping])

Initialization :
The constructor of counter can be called in any one of the following ways :

With sequence of itemsWith dictionary containing keys and countsWith keyword arguments mapping string names to counts.

OrderedDict in Python

An OrderedDict is a dictionary subclass that remembers the order that keys were first inserted. The only difference between dict() and OrderedDict() is that:

OrderedDict preserves the order in which the keys are inserted. A regular dict doesn’t track the insertion order, and iterating it gives the values in an arbitrary order. By contrast, the order the items are inserted is remembered by OrderedDict.

A Python program to demonstrate working of OrderedDict
 from collections import OrderedDict 
 print("This is a Dict:\n") 
 d = {} 
 d['a'] = 1
 d['b'] = 2
 d['c'] = 3
 d['d'] = 4
 for key, value in d.items(): 
     print(key, value) 
 print("\nThis is an Ordered Dict:\n") 
 od = OrderedDict() 
 od['a'] = 1
 od['b'] = 2
 od['c'] = 3
 od['d'] = 4
 for key, value in od.items(): 
     print(key, value) 

Output:

This is a Dict:
('a', 1)
('c', 3)
('b', 2)
('d', 4)

This is an Ordered Dict:
('a', 1)
('b', 2)
('c', 3)
('d', 4)

Important Points:

1. Key value Change: If the value of a certain key is changed, the position of the key remains unchanged in OrderedDict.

A Python program to demonstrate working of key
 value change in OrderedDict
 from collections import OrderedDict 
 print("Before:\n") 
 od = OrderedDict() 
 od['a'] = 1
 od['b'] = 2
 od['c'] = 3
 od['d'] = 4
 for key, value in od.items(): 
     print(key, value) 
 print("\nAfter:\n") 
 od['c'] = 5
 for key, value in od.items(): 
     print(key, value) 

Before: ('a', 1) ('b', 2) ('c', 3) ('d', 4) 
After: ('a', 1) ('b', 2) ('c', 5) ('d', 4)

Other Considerations:

• Ordered dict in Python version 2.7 consumes more memory than normal dict. This is due to the underlying Doubly Linked List implementation for keeping the order. In Python 2.7 Ordered Dict is not dict subclass, it’s a specialized container from collections module.
• Starting from Python 3.7, insertion order of Python dictionaries is guaranteed.
• Ordered Dict can be used as a stack with the help of popitem function. Try implementing LRU cache with Ordered Dict.