Finding the number of letters in a sentence?

Question

I am trying to write a program to find the total number of letters in a sentence. I would like to know why my program is wrong. This is what I tried:

words = ["hi", "how", "are", "you"]

alphabet = ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i", "j", "k", "l", "m", "n", "o", "p", "q", "r", "s", "t", "u", "v", "w", "x", "y", "z"]

y = 0

for i in words:
    for x in alphabet:
        n = words.count(x)
        y = y + n
print (y)

This program just returns 4 zeroes.

From my point of view, the program should run like this: In the first run of the loop, i = "hi" and x = "a" . The number of "a"'s is stored in the variable n, which is then stored in the variable y. Then x takes the value "b", "c", etc until it runs trough the whole alphabet. Then the next thing is repeated until i moves to the second word.

Answer 1

The reason your program is not working is - you are iterating the words with each word as i , but in the inner loop you are doing words.count() instead of i.count() .

This is how your for loop should look like -

for i in words:
    for x in alphabet:
        n = i.count(x)
        y = y + n
print (y)

Answer 2

Change

n = words.count(x)

to

n = i.count(x)

does the trick.

Reason

You are saying i is your one word in each iteration.So you have to use i.count(x) to get count of x in i

Answer 3

I think you should use n = i.count(x) , not "n = words.count(x)"

words = ["hi", "how", "are", "you"]

alphabet = ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i", "j", "k", "l", "m", "n", "o", "p", "q", "r", "s", "t", "u", "v", "w", "x", "y", "z"]

y = 0

for i in words:
    for x in alphabet:
        n = i.count(x)
        y = y + n

print (y)

Output

11

Answer 4

sentence = "hi how are you"
count = sum(1 for c in sentence if c.isalpha())