Question

I have a text file with a single line in it. The line of text is a whole bunch of random numbers. I need to determine the most amount of times a 5 is repeated and print how many times it’s repeated. For example: numList: 1234555325146555. The most amount of times 5 is repeated in a row is 3 and that happens 2 times. Here is the code I have so far, it shows me at what positions 5 occurs. I think this is the first step but can’t figure out how to move on.

numbers = open("numbers.txt",'rU')
count = -1
numString = numbers.readline()
for num in numString:
    count += 1
    if num == '5':
        print count
        counter += 1

Answer 1

I would continually check to see if a particular string of 5’s was in the given string until it wasn’t anymore (adding a ‘5’ each time). Then I’d back up 1 and use the count method of strings — Something like this (pseudo-code follows — Note this is not syntactically valid python. That’s up to you since this is homework.)

str5='5'
while str5 in your_string
    concatenate '5' with str5

#your string is too long by 1 element
max_string=str5 minus the last '5'
yourstring.count(max_string)