Need help figuring what is wrong with my Python code

Question

I am learning Python using the How To Think Like a Computer Scientist interactive edition, and one of the exercises has the following requirement:

"Assign to a variable in your program a triple-quoted string that contains your favorite paragraph of text - perhaps a poem, a speech, instructions to bake a cake, some inspirational verses, etc.

Write a function that counts the number of alphabetic characters (a thru z, or A thru Z) in your text and then keeps track of how many are the letter ‘e’. Your function should print an analysis of the text like this:

Your text contains 243 alphabetic characters, of which 109 (44.8%) are 'e'."

I wrote the code that (to me) seems to be doing exactly what i was asked to but when i check their solution to test my code, i get different results.

My code:

text = ''' "If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a
Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode
once a year, killing everyone inside."
-Robert Cringely'''

lowercase_text = text.lower()

def charCounter(some_text):
    e_counter = 0
    char_counter = 0

    for char in lowercase_text:    
        if char == 'e':
            e_counter = e_counter + 1
        else:
            char_counter = char_counter + 1

    return ("Your text contains " + str(char_counter) +  " alphabetic characters, of which " + str(e_counter) + " (" + str((e_counter / char_counter) * 100) + "%)" +  "are 'e'.")

My code output:

Your text contains 188 alphabetic characters, of which 25 (13.297872340425531%)are 'e'.

Solution code provided by authors:

def count(p):
    lows="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
    ups="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"

    numberOfe = 0
    totalChars = 0
    for achar in p:
        if achar in lows or achar in ups:
            totalChars = totalChars + 1
            if achar == 'e':
                numberOfe = numberOfe + 1


    percent_with_e = (numberOfe/totalChars) * 100
    print("Your text contains", totalChars, "alphabetic characters of which", numberOfe, "(", percent_with_e, "%)", "are 'e'.")


p = '''"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a
Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode
once a year, killing everyone inside."
-Robert Cringely'''

count(p)

Code output by author solution:

Your text contains 166 alphabetic characters of which 25 ( 15.060240963855422 %) are 'e'.

Can someone please explain what i am doing wrong ? I don't get why there is this difference in results.

Please take some time to learn how to format your posts on Stack Overflow. — Erik Kaplun
– Erik Kaplun, Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 11:27

jbaiter · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-27 11:38:21Z

4

Your solution does not check if a character is indeed alphanumerical and counts whitespace as well. In addition, 'e' is not added towards the total character count.

The problem is in your for-loop:

for char in lowercase_text:    
    if char == 'e':
        e_counter = e_counter + 1
    else:
        char_counter = char_counter + 1

It should look like this:

for char in lowercase_text:    
    # Check if we have an alphanumeric string and continue the loop if not
    if not char.isalpha():
        continue
    # Increment the total character counter
    char_counter += 1
    # Additionaly, increment the 'e' counter if we have an 'e'
    if char == 'e':
        e_counter += 1

edited Sep 27, 2013 at 11:38

answered Sep 27, 2013 at 11:31

jbaiter

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1 Comment

Radu Over a year ago

Thank you for the explaining the problem to me. I've tried your solution and now returns the correct result.

Daniel Roseman · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-27 11:34:39Z

0

You're including punctuation, numbers and spaces in the count, which you're not supposed to be doing.

edited Sep 27, 2013 at 11:34

answered Sep 27, 2013 at 11:28

Daniel Roseman

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Comments

Matthias · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-27 11:59:06Z

I've got no solution to the problem for it's solved already (no downvotes please), I just want to present a more pythonic way to tackle this problem (no upvotes needed either):

import string

text = ''' "If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a
Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode
once a year, killing everyone inside."
-Robert Cringely'''

def check_character(text, character):
    text = text.lower()
    count_sum = len(list(c for c in text if c in string.ascii_lowercase))
    count_char = len(list(c for c in text if c == character))
    return count_sum, count_char, 100 * count_char / float(count_sum)

char = 'e'
result = check_character(text, char) + (char,)

print("Your text contains {} alphabetic characters of which {} ({:.2f}%) are '{}'.".format(*result))

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