How To Count Repeated Characters In A String Python

In this tutorial, we will go through the process of counting repeated characters in a string using Python. This topic is useful for anyone interested in text analysis, data processing or simply learning new string manipulation techniques in Python.

Step 1: Input the string

First, let’s input the string that we want to analyze. This can be achieved using the input() function, as shown below:

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text = input("Enter a string: ")

Step 2: Define a function to count characters

Now let’s create a function called count_characters that takes a string as an argument and returns a dictionary containing the count of each character in the string. This can be done using a Python dictionary where the character is the key, and its count is the value.

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def count_characters(text):
    char_count = {}
    for char in text:
        if char in char_count:
            char_count[char] += 1
        else:
            char_count[char] = 1
    return char_count

Step 3: Call the function and print the result

Now that we have defined our count_characters function, we can call it using the input string and print the result, as shown below:

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result = count_characters(text)
print(result)

Step 4: Find and print repeated characters in the string

If you are only interested in characters that repeat in the string, you can filter the result dictionary and only print the repeated characters with their respective counts:

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repeated_chars = {char: count for char, count in result.items() if count > 1}
print("Repeated characters:")
for char, count in repeated_chars.items():
    print(f"{char}: {count}")

Full Code

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def count_characters(text):
    char_count = {}
    for char in text:
        if char in char_count:
            char_count[char] += 1
        else:
            char_count[char] = 1
    return char_count
 
text = input("Enter a string: ")
result = count_characters(text)
print(result)
 
repeated_chars = {char: count for char, count in result.items() if count > 1}
print("Repeated characters:")
for char, count in repeated_chars.items():
    print(f"{char}: {count}")

Output

Enter a string: pythonprogramminglanguage
{'p': 2, 'y': 2, 't': 2, 'h': 1, 'o': 3, 'n': 3, 'r': 3, 'g': 4, 'a': 3, 'm': 2, 'i': 1, 'l': 1, 'u': 1, 'e': 1}
Repeated characters:
p: 2
y: 2
t: 2
o: 3
n: 3
r: 3
g: 4
a: 3
m: 2

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how to count repeated characters in a string using Python. We defined a function count_characters that takes a string as input and returns a dictionary containing the count of each character in the string.

Following that, we printed the characters and their count for the repeated characters. This technique can be useful for various text analysis and data processing tasks.