How do I make a dictionary from a Python counter with the right keys?

Question

I am new to both Python and programming so please forgive a potentially stupid question.

I am using the Counter method from the collections module on a list and I am using dict() on this to make a dictionary from the results:

state_count = ['Alabama','Alabama','Alabama','Alaska','Alaska']
print dict(Counter(state_count))

The data comes out looking like this:

{'Alabama': '3', 'Alaska': '2'} etc.

What I want is to create a dictionary where the state name is a key and it would look like this:

{'state':'Alabama','other_value':'3'}
{'state':'Alaska','other_value':'2'}

The solution doesn't have to include using the Counter method, I just want to take a list that has each state name multiple times and get a count of how many times each state name is mentioned using the above dictionary format.

Answer 1

Iterate over the dictionary items and do printing the keys,values as values of string keys state and other_value .

from collections import Counter
state_count = ['Alabama','Alabama','Alabama','Alaska','Alaska']
m = Counter(state_count)
for i, j in m.items():
    print {'state':i, 'other_value':j}

Output:

{'state': 'Alabama', 'other_value': 3}
{'state': 'Alaska', 'other_value': 2}

Answer 2

If you want to use the data in a list of dicts format, you can easily create such a list:

from collections import Counter
state_count = ['Alabama','Alabama','Alabama','Alaska','Alaska']
dict_list = [{"state":k,"other_value":v} for k,v in Counter(state_count).items()]

print dict_list[0] #{'state': 'Alabama','other_value': 3}
print dict_list[0]["state"] #'Alabama'

This leaves you with the data in a usable form and not just printed output.