String count with overlapping occurrences

Question

What\'s the best way to count the number of occurrences of a given string, including overlap in Python? This is one way:

def function(string, str_to_search_f         


        

Answer 1

>>> import re
>>> text = '1011101111'
>>> len(re.findall('(?=11)', text))
5

If you didn't want to load the whole list of matches into memory, which would never be a problem! you could do this if you really wanted:

>>> sum(1 for _ in re.finditer('(?=11)', text))
5

As a function (re.escape makes sure the substring doesn't interfere with the regex):

>>> def occurrences(text, sub):
        return len(re.findall('(?={0})'.format(re.escape(sub)), text))

>>> occurrences(text, '11')
5