How to Count Characters in Python

Strings and lists represent fundamental data types for Python programmers. Both contain collections of data: string contain collections of characters that form a sentence, and lists contain collections of various types of data intermixed. If you treat a string like a list, you can perform operations on it, like determining how many characters it holds, or how many of a particular kind of character it contains.

Things You'll Need

• Python Interpreter

Instructions

1. Create a string. The string can contain an arbitrary amount of characters such as numbers, letters, punctuation, and whitespace:

   >>>x = 'This is a, string'

2. Get the length of the string using the "len) function. This function returns the total amount of characters in the string:

   >>>len(x)
   17

3. Count only the characters and punctuation. It may be the case that you don't want to count whitespace. In this instance, create a "for" loop to count each item, only counting it if it is not whitespace:

   >>>y = 0
   >>>for item in x:
   . . . if item = ' ':
   . . . pass
   . . . else:
   . . . y += 1
   >>>y
   14

References

• Python: String
• Python: Built-In Functions