Using Loops to Count Specific Characters In a String

The following program counts the number of times the letter l appears in a string:

s = 'I will be back' count=0 for letter in s:     if letter == 'l':         count = count + 1 print count

2

This program demonstrates another pattern of computation called a counter. The variable count is initialized to 0 and then incremented each time an l is found. When the loop exits, count contains the result-the total number of l’s.

Now we can create function called counts in order to count the specific letters/characters in a string.

def counts(x):

    count = 0

    s = str(x)

    l = raw_input('Enter a letter or a string: ')

    for letter in s:

        if letter == l:

            count = count + 1

    print count

x='This is my life'

counts(x)