How many times words (from list) do occur in string [python]

Question

I have a string for instance

message = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

and a large list of words. I would like to get the count (int) of how many times those words occur in string. If list is

words = ["the","over","azy","dog"]

It would return 4 (not 5). It shouldn't count word "the" 2 times. Each word only once!

possible duplicate of [python - Count number of occurences of each number](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7439578/python-count-number-of-occurences-of-each-number) — Peter Wood, Mar 11 '15 at 18:42
Means you want to check whether they are present or noy not the count right? — Tushar Gupta, Mar 11 '15 at 18:42
possible duplicate of [Count number of occurrences of a given substring in a string](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8899905/count-number-of-occurrences-of-a-given-substring-in-a-string) — Celeo, Mar 11 '15 at 18:43
if message is "abcdfefgeodlllssswaaäälöpå" then "waa" is inside it. Is "waa" a word? I don't know — P_95, Mar 11 '15 at 19:11
@user2468160 They are your requirements. You decide. I guess you mean character sequence rather than word. — Peter Wood, Mar 11 '15 at 19:36

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 11 '15 at 18:44

1

len(set(message.split()) & set(words))

answered Mar 11 '15 at 18:44

Peter Wood

23,859
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Padraic Cunningham · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-11T18:55:10.760

If you want to check for substrings also i.e azy in lazy, you need to check each word from words is in each substring of message:

message = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

words = ["the","over","azy","dog"]
print(sum(s in word for word in set(message.lower().split()) for s in words))
4

Or simply check if each word from words is contained in the string:

print(sum(word in message for word in words))
4

You also need to call lower on the string if you want to ignore case.

How many times words (from list) do occur in string [python]

2 Answers2