What is finding the most popular items?

Vote tallies from a survey form, workshop topic votes, search keywords from a log export, lunch orders collected in a group chat — the question underneath all of them is the same: what appears most often? This tool counts the occurrences of every item in your list and ranks them, so 'apple, banana, apple, cherry, banana, apple' comes back as 'apple: 3' at the top.

The options handle the gap between ideal data and real data. Choose how items are separated — a symbol like a comma, or a regular expression. Trimming and empty-item removal deal with the stray spaces and doubled separators that pasted data always produces. Case-insensitive counting merges 'Chrome' with 'chrome', which you almost always want for frequency analysis. You control how results are displayed — counts alongside items, or other formats — and how they are ordered, alphabetically or by frequency.

Beyond finding the single winner, the ranked output is genuinely useful on its own: the top ten search terms, the distribution of answers in a poll, the most common error codes in an exported log. It is a one-step frequency table for data that is too small to justify opening a spreadsheet.

Counting happens locally in your browser as you type; your data is never uploaded, which makes it comfortable to paste in customer feedback, internal logs, or survey responses. Two caveats: near-duplicates that differ by punctuation or pluralization ('shoes' vs 'shoe') count separately unless you normalize them first; and if your items contain commas, switch the separator to something that cannot appear inside an item, or the counts will be wrong.