You can use the Counter class from the collections module[1] for that as well. >>> from collections import Counter >>> c = Counter() >>> c['foo'] 0 >

You can use the Counter class from the collections module[1] for that as well. >>> from collections import Counter >>> c = Counter() >>> c['foo'] 0 >>> c['bar'] +=1 >>> c['bar'] 1 >>> [1] http://docs.python.org/dev/library/collections.html#collections.Counter http://docs.python.org/dev/library/collections.html#collecti...