Find out how many times a regex matches in a string in Python

Question

Is there a way that I can find out how many matches of a regex are in a string in Python? For example, if I have the string \"It actually happened when it acted out of

Answer 1

You can find overlapping matches by using a noncapturing subpattern:

def count_overlapping(pattern, string):
    return len(re.findall("(?=%s)" % pattern, string))

Answer 2

import re
print len(re.findall(r'ab',u'ababababa'))