Given a list of items, recall that the mode of the list is the item that occurs most often.
I would like to know how to create a function that can find the mode of a list but that displays a message if the list does not have a mode (e.g., all the items in the list only appear once). I want to make this function without importing any functions. I'm trying to make my own function from scratch.
Why not just
def print_mode (thelist):
counts = {}
for item in thelist:
counts [item] = counts.get (item, 0) + 1
maxcount = 0
maxitem = None
for k, v in counts.items ():
if v > maxcount:
maxitem = k
maxcount = v
if maxcount == 1:
print "All values only appear once"
elif counts.values().count (maxcount) > 1:
print "List has multiple modes"
else:
print "Mode of list:", maxitem
This doesn't have a few error checks that it should have, but it will find the mode without importing any functions and will print a message if all values appear only once. It will also detect multiple items sharing the same maximum count, although it wasn't clear if you wanted that.