Adding `most_common_value` to `collections.Counter`

[asross]

Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

Currently, if you just want to get the most common value in an iterable using collections.Counter, you have to do the following:

from collections import Counter

Counter(my_iterable).most_common(1)[0][0]

I think that's a bit clunky and confusing to read.

Instead, I propose something like the following:

Counter(my_iterable).most_common_value()

This would return the most frequently occurring element in the list (picking an arbitrary value or maybe the first that appears in case of a tie).

You could also add a method that takes an argument:

Counter(my_iterable).nth_most_common_value(2)

Clearly it's easy to define these as functions but it might be nice to have this in the standard library.

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

[rhettinger]

Thank you for the suggestion, but I will decline.

The method name feels awkward and the functionality duplicates what we already have in statistics.mode. Also mode has a more usable companion multimode which can gracefully handle cases with multiple modes and cases where the counter is empty.