Python Program to Find the Most Occurring Character and its Count

Last Updated : 13 Nov, 2025

Given a string, the task is to find the character that appears the most number of times along with its count. For example:

Input: geeksforgeeks
Output: ('e', 4)

Let’s explore different methods in Python to solve this problem efficiently.

Using collections.Counter()

The Counter() class from the collections module counts how many times each character appears in a string. Then, we use the most_common(1) method to get the character with the highest frequency.

Python 
from collections import Counter
s = "geeksforgeeks"
count = Counter(s)
res = count.most_common(1)[0]
print(res)

Output
('e', 4)

Explanation:

  • Counter(s) returns a dictionary-like object with characters as keys and their counts as values.
  • most_common(1) gives a list of the top 1 most frequent character.
  • [0] extracts that tuple from the list.

Using Dictionary and max() Function

This method manually creates a frequency dictionary and finds the character with the maximum count using max() with a key argument.

Python 
s = "geeksforgeeks"
freq = {}
for ch in s:
    freq[ch] = freq.get(ch, 0) + 1

res = max(freq, key=freq.get)
print(res, freq[res])

Output
e 4

Explanation:

  • freq.get(ch, 0) + 1 increments the count of each character.
  • max(freq, key=freq.get) finds the key (character) with the highest value (count).

Using Two Lists

In this method, one list stores unique characters, and the other stores their counts using the built-in count() method.

Python 
s = "geeksforgeeks"
a = []
b = []

for ch in s:
    if ch not in a:
        a.append(ch)
        b.append(s.count(ch))

res = max(b)
ele = a[b.index(res)]
print(ele, res)

Output
e 4

Explanation:

  • a keeps track of unique characters.
  • s.count(ch) returns how many times each character appears.
  • The index of the maximum value in b gives the most frequent character from a.

Using operator.countOf() Function

This method uses the operator.countOf() function to count occurrences of each character instead of the string method .count().

Python 
import operator
s = "geeksforgeeks"
a = []
b = []

for ch in s:
    if ch not in a:
        a.append(ch)
        b.append(operator.countOf(s, ch))

res = max(b)
ele = a[b.index(res)]
print(ele, res)

Output
e 4

Explanation:

  • operator.countOf(s, ch) counts occurrences of ch in s.
  • Works similar to count() but comes from the operator module.
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