Question

Assignment:

Return the number of occurrences of character c in string s,
ignoring case. Use loops. Do not use the in-built string method count,
which does a similar thing. The idea is to learn to write loops. You
should ignore case when comparing a character of s with c.

My attempt:

 def countletter(s, c): #BAD
     count = 0
     for c in s:
        if c == c:
        count += 1
        return count

Am I on the right track? I seem to get some assertion errors when I test it in the main…

Answer 1

your return is at wrong place. So your function is actually returning only after one iteration.

Also you should not use the variable name c in for loop, use some different variable, as it replaces the value of c recieved from the function call with the current character being fetched by the for-loop.

def countletter(s, c): #BAD
    count = 0
    for x in s:
        if x.lower() == c.lower():
            count += 1
    return count


print countletter("abcdefFf","F") #prints 3
print countletter("a","A")        #prints 1