Can you help me please?

Question

I'm trying to write a code that counts the number of letters in a given string using a function.

Here is my code, I keep getting 0.
I managed to return just the text, but can't seem to add in the count function.

def letter_count(text, letter):
a=[text]
b=(letter)
return(a.count(b))

text = input()
letter = input()

print(letter_count(text, letter))

Answer 1

JUMP_LINK__&&__Python__&&__JUMP_LINK Learner ,

your statement (count is a string function) could be misunderstood, but there is also a list method count() :

lst = [1,2,1,1]
print(lst.count(1))
# result is: 3

Answer 2

Hello!
Try this one, it must work

def letter_count(text, letter):
return text.count(letter)

text = input()
letter = input()

print(letter_count(text, letter))

Answer 3

James Murphy ,

your task description is not quite clear. it could mean:

=> count the number of letters in a given string. "hello" result => 5
or
=> count the number of a CERTAIN letter in a given string. "hello", "l" result is => 2

can you please give us a clear and complete task description?

thanks!

Answer 4

Just removing the [ ] and () worked so thanks very much Python Learner

Answer 5

James Murphy Change it to 'text.count(letter)' and it should work without any problems.

Answer 6

Hi James!
That's because count() is a string function. But you're applying this to a list and a tuple. Hope you know "[]" is used to denote list and "()" is for tuple in Python. Inorder to solve this issue, you can remove the square brackets and parentheses from the assigned variables.

Answer 7

Thanks all,
Lothar, sorry I wasn't clear. I need to count the number of times a specific letter appears in the string. Both the text and letter to be counted come from input()

Answer 8

I think that this ⬆️ is what I was trying to do.

Answer 9

James Murphy How about this one? :-

def foo(text, letter):
return text.count(letter)

print(foo(input(), input()))

# I hope that this helps. Happy coding!

Answer 10

[This comment will be deleted soon]

Recently, I've been receiving downvotes without any explanation. In my opinion, this is really bad without a proper justification.

Answer 11

# Not mine
# credit: https://www.sololearn.com/Discuss/2896020/JUMP_LINK__&&__python__&&__JUMP_LINK-how-many-letters

def letter_count(text, letter):
#your code goes here
return text.count(letter)
text = str(input())
letter = str(input())
print(letter_count(text,letter))

Answer 12

def letter_count(text, letter):
i =0
for x in text:
if x == letter:
i=i+1
return i
text = input()
letter = input()

print(letter_count(text, letter))

I hope it works

Answer 13

I will try out these suggests, thanks very much.
I knew the [ ] would create a list, I thought that I needed to put the string into a list to be able to do the count.

Answer 14

Here is the original problem:

Write a function that takes a string and a letter as its arguments and returns the count of the letter in the string.

Sample Input
hello, how are you?
o

Sample Output
3

Explanation
The letter o appears 3 times in the given text.