Count Letters in Word in Python

In Python, we can easily count the letters in a word using the Python len() function and list comprehension to filter out characters which aren’t letters.

def countLetters(word):
    return len([x for x in word if x.isalpha()])

print(countLetters("Word."))
print(countLetters("Word.with.non-letters1"))

#Output:
4
18

This is equivalent to looping over all letters in a word and checking if each character is a letter.

def countLetters(word):
    count = 0
    for x in word:
        if x.isalpha():
            count = count + 1
    return count

print(countLetters("Word."))
print(countLetters("Word.with.non-letters1"))

#Output:
4
18

If you’d like to get the count of each letter in Python, you can use the Python collections module.

import collections

print(collections.Counter("Word"))

#Output:
Counter({'W': 1, 'o': 1, 'r': 1, 'd': 1})

If you’d like to get the letters of all words in a string, we can use the Python split() function in combination with the len() function.

string_of_words = "This is a string of words."

letter_counts = []
for x in string_of_words.split(" "):
    letter_counts.append(len([x for x in word if x.isalpha()]))

print(letter_counts)

#Output:
[4, 2, 1, 6, 2, 5]

When working with strings, it is very useful to be able to easily extract information about our variables.

One such piece of information which is valuable is the number of letters a string has.

We can use the Python len() function to get the number of letters in a string easily.

print(len("Word"))

#Output:
4

If you have a string with punctuation or numbers in it, we can use list comprehension to filter out the characters which aren’t letters and then get the length of this new string.

def countLetters(word):
    return len([x for x in word if x.isalpha()])

print(countLetters("Word."))
print(countLetters("Word.with.non-letters1"))

#Output:
4
18

If you don’t want to use list comprehension, loop over each element in the string and see if it is a letter or not with the Python isalpha() function.

def countLetters(word):
    count = 0
    for x in word:
        if x.isalpha():
            count = count + 1
    return count

print(countLetters("Word."))
print(countLetters("Word.with.non-letters1"))

#Output:
4
18

Finding Count of All Letters in a Word Using Python

In Python, we can also find the unique count of all letters in a word, and the number of times each letter appears in a word.

The Python collections module is very useful and provides a number of functions which allow us to create new data structures from lists.

One such data structure is the Counter data structure.

The Counter data structure counts up all of the occurrences of a value in a list.

To get the count of all letters in a word, we can use the Python collections Counter data structure in the following Python code.

import collections

print(collections.Counter("Word"))

#Output:
Counter({'W': 1, 'o': 1, 'r': 1, 'd': 1})

If you then want to get the count of any particular letter, you can access the count just like you would access a value in a dictionary.

import collections

c = collections.Counter("Word")

print(c["W"])

#Output:
1

Counting Letters of All Words in a String Using Python

When processing strings in a program, it can be useful to know how many words there are in the string, and how many letters are in each word. Using Python, we can easily get the number of letters in each word in a string with the Python len() function.

Let’s say you have a string which is a sentence (in other words, each word in the sentence is delimited by a space).

We can use the Python split() function to change the string into a list, and then loop over the list to get the length of each word in a string.

Below is a Python function which will count the letters in all words in a string using Python.

string_of_words = "This is a string of words."

letter_counts = []
for x in string_of_words.split(" "):
    letter_counts.append(len([x for x in word if x.isalpha()]))

print(letter_counts)

#Output:
[4, 2, 1, 6, 2, 5]

Hopefully this article has been useful for you to learn how to count letters in words in Python.