Maximum Frequency Character in String – Python

Last Updated : 28 Feb, 2025

The task of finding the maximum frequency character in a string involves identifying the character that appears the most number of times. For example, in the string “hello world”, the character ‘l’ appears the most frequently (3 times).

Using `collection.Counter`

Counter class from the collections module is an easy way to count the occurrences of each character in a string. It returns a dictionary-like object where keys are the characters and values are their frequencies.

Python

from collections import Counter  s = "hello world"  # Count the frequency of characters frequency = Counter(s)  # Get the character with the maximum frequency max_char = max(frequency, key=frequency.get)  print(max_char)

Output

Explanation

Counter(s) creates a dictionary where the keys are characters and the values are the counts of those characters in the string s.
max(frequency, key=frequency.get) finds the character with the highest frequency by comparing the values (counts) in the dictionary. The result is stored in max_char and printed.

Using `dict.get()` with `max()`

This method involves creating a dictionary to store the frequency of each character and then using the max() function to find the character with the highest frequency. The dict.get() method helps in counting occurrences efficiently.

Python

s = "hello world"  # Create a dictionary to store character frequencies freq = {}  # Count the frequency of each character for char in s:     freq[char] = freq.get(char, 0) + 1  # Get the character with the maximum frequency max_char = max(freq, key=freq.get)  print(max_char)

Output

Explanation

We loop through each character in the string and use freq.get(char, 0) + 1 to update the frequency of each character.
max(freq, key=freq.get) finds the key (character) with the highest frequency by comparing the values (counts) in the dictionary .

Using `str.count()`

str.count() method counts the occurrences of a specific character in the string. By iterating over each unique character and using this method, we can find the one with the maximum frequency.

Python

s = "hello world"  # Initialize variables for tracking max frequency and character max_char = '' max_count = 0  # Loop through each unique character for char in set(s):     count = s.count(char)     if count > max_count:         max_count = count         max_char = char  print(max_char)

Output

Explanation

We loop through each unique character in the string using set(s) to avoid duplicates.
s.count(char) is used to calculate the frequency of each character. If a character’s count is greater than the current max_count, we update max_count and max_char accordingly.

Using `sorted()` with `key`

sorted() function can be used to sort the characters based on their frequency. By passing a custom sorting key like s.count(char), we can sort the characters in descending order of frequency and select the first one.

Python

s = "hello world"  # Sort the string and find the character with the maximum frequency max_char = sorted(set(s), key=lambda char: s.count(char), reverse=True)[0]  print(max_char)

Output

Explanation

sorted(set(s), key=lambda char: s.count(char), reverse=True) sorts the unique characters from the string based on their frequency in descending order.
The [0] index retrieves the character with the highest frequency, which is then printed.