How can I find the second and third, etc. most frequent character in say a list of words (cell array of strings)?

How can I find the second and third, etc. most frequent character in say a list of words (cell array of strings)?

I know how to find the most frequent in all words: mode(strjoin(dict,'')). However I know want to know how to find the second and third and fourth etc. Dict is my a list of words.

Answer 1

[TastyPastry]

a = unique(myStr);
n = histc(myStr,a);
[n,idx] = sort(n);
myFreq = myStr(idx);

Now myFreq will be the unique characters sorted from highest occurring to lowest. The sorted vector n will give you the number of times a character appears in your string. This does assume you've already concatenated all the words using

strjoin(dict,'');

[Paramjeet Panwar]

I beleive there might be a slight correction

a = unique(myStr);

n = histc(myStr,a);

[n,idx] = sort(n);

myFreq = a(idx); %Unique Values

[Zhimeng Wang]

Could you elaborate on what each one means? For example, what is a, n, idx and myFreq respectively? Thank you!

[Walter Roberson]

a is the list of unique values in myStr

n is the count of the number of times each unique value in myStr occurs.

Then n is sorted into ascending order, and the sort order is recorded in idx

myFreq then uses the recorded sort order in order to sort the unique values into ascending order according to count.