How to create a list of counts from a unique list and a Counter object?

Question

I have a Counter() object that gives me count occurrences of a list of strings. And I have a unique list of strings. And I need to yield a list of counts from the counter and then put zeros to the other string instances that have 0 counts.

I can do it as the following but can I achieve the same z list in a more efficient/pythonic way?

from collections import Counter
x = Counter(['abc','def','abc'])
uniq = sorted(set(['abc', 'def', 'abc', 'abc', 'ghi', 'jkl','jkl']))
z = [x[i] for i in uniq]

Output

>>> z
[2, 1, 0, 0]
>>> uniq
['abc', 'def', 'ghi', 'jkl']

Actually the ultimate aim is to get an np.array(z) and np.array(uniq)

Answer 1

I suppose you could use the Counter's update method to add 0 to all of the keys in the unique list

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> x = Counter(['abc','def','abc'])
>>> y = ['abc', 'def', 'abc', 'abc', 'ghi', 'jkl','jkl']
>>> x.update(dict.fromkeys(y, 0))

So that x now contains the keys and values you want.

Or, if you want to avoid the construction of the intermediate dict, the slightly longer:

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> x = Counter(['abc','def','abc'])
>>> y = ['abc', 'def', 'abc', 'abc', 'ghi', 'jkl','jkl']
>>> for k in y:
        x[k] += 0