How to determine the majority of appearances of a list in list of lists. (Python)

Question

I am trying to determine the majority in a list of lists for a project I am working on. My problem is that the code will run in an environment that not allow me to use packages. Can someone refer me to an algorithm that does what I am asking or let me know about a way to do it with pre built functions in python that don't require outside packages?. Thank you for your time.

Example:

data = [ ["hello", 1], ["hello", 1], ["hello", 1], ["other", 32] ]

Output:

["hello", 1]

Answer 1

You can actually use a dictionairy to save the lists as keys and use the values as count. Then you can take the maximum count, to get your result.

data = [ ["hello", 1], ["hello", 1], ["hello", 1], ["other", 32] ]

# Make a dictionary:
dic = {}

# Loop over every item in the data
for item in data:

    # Convert to tuple, since a list is unhashable:
    entry = tuple(item)

    # Add one to the count
    # dic.get() gets the value of the entry in the dictionairy
    # if this exists. Else, it sets the value to 0.
    dic[entry] = dic.get(entry, 0) + 1

# Get the maximum argument by using a lambda function 
# on the items in the dictionary. Get the key by taking index 0.
result = max(dic.items(), key = lambda x: x[1])[0]
    

You might want to convert the tuple back to a list by

result = list(result)

Answer 2

Try this:

data = [ ["hello", 1], ["hello", 1], ["hello", 1], ["other", 32] ]

for i in data:
    if data.count(i) == max(data.count(i) for i in data):
        res = i

print(res)

Or this:

res = [i for i in data if data.count(i) == max(data.count(i) for i in data)][0]
print(res)

Output:

['hello', 1]