Count number of occurrences of a given substring in a string

Question

How can I count the number of times a given substring is present within a string in Python?

For example:

>>> \'foo bar foo\'.numberOfOccurre         


        

Answer 1

Overlapping occurences:

def olpcount(string,pattern,case_sensitive=True):
    if case_sensitive != True:
        string  = string.lower()
        pattern = pattern.lower()
    l = len(pattern)
    ct = 0
    for c in range(0,len(string)):
        if string[c:c+l] == pattern:
            ct += 1
    return ct

test = 'my maaather lies over the oceaaan'
print test
print olpcount(test,'a')
print olpcount(test,'aa')
print olpcount(test,'aaa')

Results:

my maaather lies over the oceaaan
6
4
2