What’s the simplest way to count the number of occurrences of a character in a string?

e.g. count the number of times 'a' appears in 'Mary had a little lamb'

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.

>>> sentence = 'Mary had a little lamb'
>>> sentence.count('a')
4

You can use count() :

>>> 'Mary had a little lamb'.count('a')
4

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']

Regular expressions maybe?

import re
my_string = "Mary had a little lamb"
len(re.findall("a", my_string))

myString.count('a');

more info here

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.

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

This easy and straight forward function might help:

def check_freq(x):
    freq = {}
    for c in x:
       freq[c] = str.count(c)
    return freq

check_freq("abbabcbdbabdbdbabababcbcbab")
{'a': 7, 'b': 14, 'c': 3, 'd': 3}

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.

a = 'have a nice day'
symbol = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
for key in symbol:
    print key, a.count(key)

str = "count a character occurance"

List = list(str)
print (List)
Uniq = set(List)
print (Uniq)

for key in Uniq:
    print (key, str.count(key))

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)

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.

“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()

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

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))

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)

No more than this IMHO – you can add the upper or lower methods

def count_letter_in_str(string,letter):
    return string.count(letter)