Count how many times each letter appears in a text sample

Question

I need a function that counts how many times each individual letter appears in a string. It has to count capitals and lowercase as the same letter. I sort of did it, but its not exactly pretty.

def lmao(x):

    aye=x.count("a")
    Aye=x.count("A")
    bye=x.count("b")
    Bye=x.count("B")
    cye=x.count("c")
    Cye=x.count("C")
    dye=x.count("d")
    Dye=x.count("D")
    Eye=x.count("E")
    eye=x.count("e")
    Fye=x.count("F")
    fye=x.count("f")
    Gye=x.count("G")
    gye=x.count("g")
    Hye=x.count("H")
    hye=x.count("h")
    Iye=x.count("I")
    iye=x.count("i")
    Jye=x.count("J")
    jye=x.count("j")
    Kye=x.count("K")
    kye=x.count("k")
    Lye=x.count("L")
    lye=x.count("l")
    Mye=x.count("M")
    mye=x.count("m")
    Nye=x.count("N")
    nye=x.count("n")
    Oye=x.count("O")
    oye=x.count("o")
    Pye=x.count("P")
    pye=x.count("P")
    Qye=x.count("Q")
    qye=x.count("q")
    rye=x.count("r")
    Rye=x.count("R")
    sye=x.count("s")
    Sye=x.count("S")
    tye=x.count("t")
    Tye=x.count("T")
    uye=x.count("u")
    Uye=x.count("U")
    Vye=x.count("V")
    vye=x.count("v")
    Wye=x.count("W")
    wye=x.count("w")
    Xye=x.count("X")
    xye=x.count("x")
    Yye=x.count("Y")
    yye=x.count("y")
    Zye=x.count("Z")
    zye=x.count("z")
    killme=(aye+Aye,bye+Bye,cye+Cye,Dye+dye,Eye+eye,Fye+fye,Gye+gye,Hye+hye,Iye+iye,jye+Jye,Kye+kye,Lye+lye,Mye+mye,Nye+nye,Oye+oye,Pye+pye,Qye+qye,rye+Rye,sye+Sye,Tye+tye,uye+Uye,Vye+vye,Wye+wye,xye+Xye,Yye+yye,Zye+zye)
    return killme

So yeah, thats the disaster that I came up with. Is there any way to shorten this process?

Answer 1

Use collections.Counter https://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#counter-objects

from collections import Counter    
counter = Counter(mystr.lower())

will give you all occurrences of each letter, ignoring case

Answer 2

To return exactly what you've requested:

import string
def lmao(x):
    return tuple(x.lower().count(c) for c in string.lowercase)

Answer 3

This may help:

def counter(text):
    count_list = []
    for char in "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz":
        count_list.append(text.lower().count(char))
    return tuple(count_list)

print(counter("Helllo123"))

Output:

(0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 3, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)

Answer 4

Use counter together with a dictionary comprehension to get the count of each letter.

import string
from collections import Counter

For an alpha sorted tuple,

def count_letter_tuples(sentence):
    return tuple(Counter(sentence.lower()).get(c, 0) for c in string.ascii_lowercase)

>>> count_letter_tuples("Some Big Sentence")
(0, 0, 1, 0, 4, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)

Or for a dictionary response:

def count_letters(sentence):
    return {c: Counter(sentence.lower()).get(c, 0) for c in string.ascii_lowercase}

>>> count_letters("Some Big Sentence")
{'a': 0,
 'b': 1,
 'c': 1,
 'd': 0,
 'e': 4,
 'f': 0,
 'g': 1,
 'h': 0,
 'i': 1,
 'j': 0,
 'k': 0,
 'l': 0,
 'm': 1,
 'n': 2,
 'o': 1,
 'p': 0,
 'q': 0,
 'r': 0,
 's': 2,
 't': 1,
 'u': 0,
 'v': 0,
 'w': 0,
 'x': 0,
 'y': 0,
 'z': 0}