I can identify lowercase and uppercase letters and put them in a dictionary. I need to join the uppercase and lowercase values together

Question

I need to know how many times a character shows, and keep the results into a dictionary. For example: {"e": 8, "s": 7} means "e" shows 8 times and "s" shows 7 times. I have to make the upper and lower case values to be the same.

I managed to be able to find out how many times each character is shown. I am having trouble in getting the Uppercase and lowercase letters to be together and not separate.

counting_symbols = {}
for letter in "Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques" \
              " for secure communication in the presence of third parties" \
              " called adversaries. More generally, cryptography is about" \
              " constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third" \
              " parties or the public from reading private messages; various " \
              "aspects in information security such as data confidentiality, " \
              "data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation are central " \
              "to modern cryptography. Modern cryptography exists at the" \
              " intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, " \
              "electrical engineering, communication science, and physics. Applications " \
              "of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, " \
              "digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.":
    counting_symbols[letter] = counting_symbols.get(letter, 0) + 1



print(counting_symbols)

That gives the Uppercase and lowercase letters separate. Can someone help in in making them join together?

Answer 1

You just need to add 1 line of code to convert letter to lowercase:

counting_symbols = {}
for letter in "Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques" \
          " for secure communication in the presence of third parties" \
          " called adversaries. More generally, cryptography is about" \
          " constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third" \
          " parties or the public from reading private messages; various " \
          "aspects in information security such as data confidentiality, " \
          "data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation are central " \
          "to modern cryptography. Modern cryptography exists at the" \
          " intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, " \
          "electrical engineering, communication science, and physics. Applications " \
          "of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, " \
          "digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.":
letter = str.lower(letter)
counting_symbols[letter] = counting_symbols.get(letter, 0) + 1

print(counting_symbols)

Answer 2

You can lower all characters using lower() function and save it to another variable.

It's also a good practice to use Counter class from collections library. A Counter object automatically counts characters in a string or strings in a list and save the data in a dictionary.

text = "Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques"
lower_chars = text.lower()

from collections import Counter
counter = Counter(lower_chars)
print(counter)

Answer 3

The way you count them can be more specific. Just to give you a pseudo-code example:

if(letter == ('S' or 's')):
  num_s = num_s+1

You can just copy and paste this line for each letter, in a function for example. And at the end, you can return these numbers. I hope that you get the major point of my algorithm. You can implement it in many ways, my algorithm is just to be very very specific.