You could try a collections.defaultdict object with an integer as the startup value:
counts = collections.defaultdict(int) for thing in long_list: counts[get_last_two_digits(thing)] += 1 This assumes get_last_two_digits is the function that provides the key you want to count by. I'm not sure what you want get_last_two_digits to look like from your post, or how you would get the long_list, which is just an iterator through your records. Josh -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
