count is definitely the most concise and efficient way of counting the occurrence of a character in a string but I tried to come up with a solution using lambda, something like this :
sentence = 'Mary had a little lamb'
sum(map(lambda x : 1 if 'a' in x else 0, sentence))
This will result in :
4
Also, there is one more advantage to this is if the sentence is a list of sub-strings containing same characters as above, then also this gives the correct result because of the use of in. Have a look :
sentence = ['M', 'ar', 'y', 'had', 'a', 'little', 'l', 'am', 'b']
sum(map(lambda x : 1 if 'a' in x else 0, sentence))
This also results in :
4
But Of-course this will work only when checking occurrence of single character such as 'a' in this particular case.
str = "count a character occurance"
List = list(str)
print (List)
Uniq = set(List)
print (Uniq)
for key in Uniq:
print (key, str.count(key))
a = 'have a nice day'
symbol = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
for key in symbol:
print key, a.count(key)
Python 3
Ther are two ways to achieve this:
1) With built-in function count()
sentence = 'Mary had a little lamb'
print(sentence.count('a'))`
2) Without using a function
sentence = 'Mary had a little lamb'
count = 0
for i in sentence:
if i == "a":
count = count + 1
print(count)
I don't know about 'simplest' but simple comprehension could do:
>>> my_string = "Mary had a little lamb"
>>> sum(char == 'a' for char in my_string)
4
Taking advantage of built-in sum, generator comprehension and fact that bool is subclass of integer: how may times character is equal to 'a'.
I know the ask is to count a particular letter. I am writing here generic code without using any method.
sentence1 =" Mary had a little lamb"
count = {}
for i in sentence1:
if i in count:
count[i.lower()] = count[i.lower()] + 1
else:
count[i.lower()] = 1
print(count)
output
{' ': 5, 'm': 2, 'a': 4, 'r': 1, 'y': 1, 'h': 1, 'd': 1, 'l': 3, 'i': 1, 't': 2, 'e': 1, 'b': 1}
Now if you want any particular letter frequency, you can print like below.
print(count['m'])
2
myString.count('a');
more info here
Regular expressions maybe?
import re
my_string = "Mary had a little lamb"
len(re.findall("a", my_string))
spam = 'have a nice day'
var = 'd'
def count(spam, var):
found = 0
for key in spam:
if key == var:
found += 1
return found
count(spam, var)
print 'count %s is: %s ' %(var, count(spam, var))
"Without using count to find you want character in string" method.
import re
def count(s, ch):
pass
def main():
s = raw_input ("Enter strings what you like, for example, 'welcome': ")
ch = raw_input ("Enter you want count characters, but best result to find one character: " )
print ( len (re.findall ( ch, s ) ) )
main()
No more than this IMHO - you can add the upper or lower methods
def count_letter_in_str(string,letter):
return string.count(letter)
I am a fan of the pandas library, in particular the value_counts() method. You could use it to count the occurrence of each character in your string:
>>> import pandas as pd
>>> phrase = "I love the pandas library and its `value_counts()` method"
>>> pd.Series(list(phrase)).value_counts()
8
a 5
e 4
t 4
o 3
n 3
s 3
d 3
l 3
u 2
i 2
r 2
v 2
` 2
h 2
p 1
b 1
I 1
m 1
( 1
y 1
_ 1
) 1
c 1
dtype: int64
a = "I walked today,"
c=['d','e','f']
count=0
for i in a:
if str(i) in c:
count+=1
print(count)
As other answers said, using the string method count() is probably the simplest, but if you're doing this frequently, check out collections.Counter:
from collections import Counter
my_str = "Mary had a little lamb"
counter = Counter(my_str)
print counter['a']
This easy and straight forward function might help:
def check_freq(x):
freq = {}
for c in set(x):
freq[c] = x.count(c)
return freq
check_freq("abbabcbdbabdbdbabababcbcbab")
{'a': 7, 'b': 14, 'c': 3, 'd': 3}
If a comprehension is desired:
def check_freq(x):
return {c: x.count(c) for c in set(x)}
Python-3.x:
"aabc".count("a")
str.count(sub[, start[, end]])
Return the number of non-overlapping occurrences of substring sub in the range [start, end]. Optional arguments start and end are interpreted as in slice notation.
An alternative way to get all the character counts without using Counter(), count and regex
counts_dict = {}
for c in list(sentence):
if c not in counts_dict:
counts_dict[c] = 0
counts_dict[c] += 1
for key, value in counts_dict.items():
print(key, value)
str.count(a) is the best solution to count a single character in a string. But if you need to count more characters you would have to read the whole string as many times as characters you want to count.
A better approach for this job would be:
from collections import defaultdict
text = 'Mary had a little lamb'
chars = defaultdict(int)
for char in text:
chars[char] += 1
So you'll have a dict that returns the number of occurrences of every letter in the string and 0 if it isn't present.
>>>chars['a']
4
>>>chars['x']
0
For a case insensitive counter you could override the mutator and accessor methods by subclassing defaultdict (base class' ones are read-only):
class CICounter(defaultdict):
def __getitem__(self, k):
return super().__getitem__(k.lower())
def __setitem__(self, k, v):
super().__setitem__(k.lower(), v)
chars = CICounter(int)
for char in text:
chars[char] += 1
>>>chars['a']
4
>>>chars['M']
2
>>>chars['x']
0
You can use count() :
>>> 'Mary had a little lamb'.count('a')
4
Regular expressions are very useful if you want case-insensitivity (and of course all the power of regex).
my_string = "Mary had a little lamb"
# simplest solution, using count, is case-sensitive
my_string.count("m") # yields 1
import re
# case-sensitive with regex
len(re.findall("m", my_string))
# three ways to get case insensitivity - all yield 2
len(re.findall("(?i)m", my_string))
len(re.findall("m|M", my_string))
len(re.findall(re.compile("m",re.IGNORECASE), my_string))
Be aware that the regex version takes on the order of ten times as long to run, which will likely be an issue only if my_string is tremendously long, or the code is inside a deep loop.
Source: Stackoverflow.com