Find the most frequent character in a string in Python

Count how many times each character appears, then pick the highest count. Spaces are skipped, because they are usually not what you want to count.

The program

text = input("Enter some text: ")

counts = {}
for ch in text:
    if ch != " ":
        counts[ch] = counts.get(ch, 0) + 1

highest = max(counts.values())
winners = [ch for ch in counts if counts[ch] == highest]

print(f"Most frequent: {', '.join(winners)} ({highest} times)")

Typed in this example: hello world. Press Run to type your own.

Enter some text: hello world
Most frequent: l (3 times)

How it works

• counts.get(ch, 0) gives the current count for ch, or 0 if ch is not in the dictionary yet. Adding 1 and storing the result counts the character.
• max(counts.values()) is the highest count.
• More than one character can have the highest count, so winners collects all of them. They stay in the order they first appear in the text.

Ties

In "programming", three letters appear twice. The program reports all three:

text = "programming"

counts = {}
for ch in text:
    counts[ch] = counts.get(ch, 0) + 1

highest = max(counts.values())
winners = [ch for ch in counts if counts[ch] == highest]
print(winners, highest)

['r', 'g', 'm'] 2

Another way: Counter

Counter from the collections module does the counting for you. most_common(3) gives the three most common characters with their counts:

from collections import Counter

counts = Counter("mississippi")
print(counts.most_common(3))

[('i', 4), ('s', 4), ('p', 2)]

When counts are equal, most_common() lists the character that appeared first in the text first.

Related programs: Count character frequency.