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

Python's str.count counts non-overlapping substrings:

In [3]: "ababa".count("aba")
Out[3]: 1

Here are a few ways to count overlapping sequences, I'm sure there are many more :)

Look-ahead regular expressions

How to find overlapping matches with a regexp?

In [10]: re.findall("a(?=ba)", "ababa")
Out[10]: ['a', 'a']

Generate all substrings

In [11]: data = "ababa"
In [17]: sum(1 for i in range(len(data)) if data.startswith("aba", i))
Out[17]: 2