Using loops to count specific characters in a string

The following program counts the number of times the letter l appears 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)