Given a list of string, return a dictionary of key: value as string: number of times

To create a dictionary of key-value pairs where the key is a string from a list and the value is the number of times that string appears in the list, you can use a loop to iterate over the list and add each string to a dictionary with its count as the value. Here's an example code snippet:

def count_strings(lst):
    # create an empty dictionary
    string_counts = {}

    # iterate over the list
    for string in lst:
        # if the string is already in the dictionary, increment its count
        if string in string_counts:
            string_counts[string] += 1
        # otherwise, add the string to the dictionary with a count of 1
        else:
            string_counts[string] = 1

    # return the dictionary
    return string_counts

You can call this function with a list of strings as an argument to get a dictionary of string counts. For example:

count_strings(["apple", "banana", "apple", "orange", "banana", "pear"])

Output:

{'apple': 2, 'banana': 2, 'orange': 1, 'pear': 1}