I have a plain research paper text file and I am asked to count the number of quotes in that file using Python. How would I go about doing this? Is there a way to count the number of occurrences of the character " in the file?

2 Answers

This short program will do:

import sys
print(sum(line.count(sys.argv[1]) for line in sys.stdin))

One-liner and usage:

python3 -c 'import sys; print(sum(line.count(sys.argv[1]) for line in sys.stdin))' '"' < data.txt

An arguably simpler, non-Python solution based on tr and wc would be:

tr -c -d '"' < data.txt | wc -c

If there's at most one match per line you can also use grep in “count” mode:

grep -cFe '"' data.txt

You can use count() it returns the number of (non-overlapping) occurrences