What is the preferred way to count the number of ocurrences of a certain character in a string?

Question

How do I do this without string.count(), because it is listed as deprecated in Python v2.7.3 documentation?

I am unable to find what I should use instea

Answer 1

Without using count you can do this:

def my_count(my_string, key_char):
    return sum(c == key_char for c in my_string)

Result:

>>> my_count('acavddgaaa','a')
5