How can I count the occurrences of a list item?

Question

Given an item, how can I count its occurrences in a list in Python?

Answer 1

from collections import Counter

bag = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'c']

c = Counter(bag) # returns a dictionary {'a': 1, 'b': 1, 'c': 2}

print(c['a']) # get num of occurrences of 'a', which is 1