python counting letters in string without count function

Question

I am trying to write a program to count the occurrences of a specific letter in a string without the count function. I made the string into a list and set a loop to count but th

Answer 1

Your count is never changing because you are using == which is equality testing, where you should be using = to reassign count. Even better, you can increment with

count += 1

Also note that else: continue doesn't really do anything as you will continue with the next iteration of the loop anyways. If I were to have to come up with an alternative way to count without using the count function, I would lean towards regex:

import re
stringy = "aardvark"
print(len(re.findall("a", stringy)))