Counting substring or word in a string

Question

I was wondering how, in python, I could count the occurrences of the word "the" in a string. The problem I get is that it will count "the" in words like: there, theatre....etc

s = "The Journey: today I went there! There was not the...theatre but the Walgreens so I could buy a thermometer"

howmanythe = s.count("the") #I feel like here you could do " the " but I would miss any "the" after grammar notation
print("There are {} many the's in that phrase".format(howmanythe))

Sorry if my formating is bad, this is my first post.

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 11 '20 at 15:18

2

You may try a regex search on \bthe\b, in case insensitive mode, which will find all the words in the text:

s = "The Journey: today I went there! There was not the...theatre but the Walgreens so I could buy a thermometer"
num = len(re.findall(r'\bthe\b', s, flags=re.IGNORECASE))
print("There were " + str(num) + " 'the' words in the text")

This prints:

There were 3 'the' words in the text

answered Aug 11 '20 at 15:18

Tim Biegeleisen

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Just don't forget to `import re` :) – pitamer Aug 11 '20 at 15:25
1

@pitamer [I wouldn't forget that for the world :-)](https://rextester.com/TIKHB23088). – Tim Biegeleisen Aug 11 '20 at 15:26

Counting substring or word in a string

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