Overview
Introduction
Knowing which values show up most often in a list, a leaderboard-style ranking rather than just a yes/no duplicate check, is useful for analysis tasks like reviewing survey answers or tag usage.
Popular List Item Finder ranks every distinct value in your list by how often it occurs, most frequent first.
What Is Popular List Item Finder?
A frequency-ranking tool: it counts every distinct value's occurrences across the whole list and sorts the results from most to least frequent.
An optional Top N limit trims the ranking down to just the leaders, useful when a list has many distinct values and you only care about the handful that dominate.
How Popular List Item Finder Works
The input is split into items using the selected separator, then every distinct value's occurrence count is tallied.
The tallied values are sorted by count descending (ties keep their original relative order) and formatted as "value — count", optionally truncated to the top N entries.
When To Use Popular List Item Finder
Use it to build a quick frequency ranking of tags, categories, or survey responses pasted from elsewhere.
Set a Top N limit when you only need the handful of most common values, for example the top 5 most-used labels.
Often used alongside Repeating List Item Finder, Duplicate List Item Finder and List Filter.
Features
Advantages
- Ranks every value, unlike Repeating List Item Finder which only shows values occurring two or more times.
- The optional Top N limit makes it easy to focus on just the leaders in a large, noisy list.
Limitations
- Comparison is exact and case-sensitive with no trimming applied, so near-identical values with different casing are counted separately.
- Doesn't report each value's positions in the original list; use List Item Finder for that.
Examples
Best Practices & Notes
Best Practices
- Set Top N when working with a large list of mostly-unique values, to avoid a long tail of single-occurrence entries cluttering the ranking.
- Use Repeating List Item Finder instead if you only care about values that repeat, not a full frequency ranking.
Developer Notes
Builds a `Map<string, number>` frequency table, converts it to an entries array, and sorts with `.sort((a, b) => b[1] - a[1])`, relying on the ECMAScript 2019+ specification guarantee that `Array.prototype.sort` is a stable sort to preserve first-seen order among ties.
Popular List Item Finder Use Cases
- Ranking the most common tags, categories, or labels in a dataset
- Finding the top N most frequent survey or form responses
- Auditing which values dominate a large pasted list at a glance
Common Mistakes
- Expecting alphabetical or original-order output; results are always sorted by descending frequency.
- Setting Top N to a negative number, which is rejected as invalid input.
Tips
- Leave Top N at 0 to see the full ranking first, then dial it in once you know how many distinct values exist.
- Combine with a custom separator for lists that aren't newline- or comma-delimited, like pipe-separated log fields.