Sum numbers by letter in list of tuples
<p>I have a list of tuples: </p>

<pre><code>[ ('A',100), ('B',50), ('A',50), ('B',20), ('C',10) ]
</code></pre>

<p>I am trying to sum up all numbers that have the same letter. I.e. I want to output </p>

<pre><code>[('A', 150), ('B', 70), ('C',10)] 
</code></pre>

<p>I have tried using set to get the unique values but then when I try and compare the first elements to the set I get </p>

<pre><code>TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'str'
</code></pre>

<p>Any quick solutions to match the numbers by letter?</p>

<p>Here is a one(and a half?)-liner: group by letter (for which you need to sort before), then take the sum of the second entries of your tuples.</p>

<pre><code>from itertools import groupby
from operator import itemgetter

data = [('A', 100), ('B', 50), ('A', 50), ('B', 20), ('C', 10)]
res = [(k, sum(map(itemgetter(1), g)))
       for k, g in groupby(sorted(data, key=itemgetter(0)), key=itemgetter(0))]
print(res)
// =&gt; [('A', 150), ('B', 70), ('C', 10)]
</code></pre>

<p>The above is O(n log n) &mdash; sorting is the most expensive operation. If your input list is truly large, you might be better served by the following O(n) approach:</p>

<pre><code>from collections import defaultdict

data = [('A', 100), ('B', 50), ('A', 50), ('B', 20), ('C', 10)]

d = defaultdict(int)
for letter, value in data:
    d[letter] += value
res = list(d.items())
print(res)
// =&gt; [('B', 70), ('C', 10), ('A', 150)]
</code></pre>

python list tuples