Counting vowels and consonants in a string

Question

The output should display as follows...

PROGRAM: Vowel count
Please, enter a text string: fred
4 characters
a e i o u
0 1 0 0 0
b c d f g h j k l m n p q r s t v w x y z
0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 

It works; but, I believe is way over long...; maybe, I should have used arrays/or, ASCII count/-etc.?

vowels="aeiou"
aCount=eCount=iCount=oCount=uCount=0
consonants="bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz"
bCount=cCount=dCount=fCount=gCount=hCount=jCount=kCount=lCount=mCount=nCount=oCount=pCount=qCount=rCount=sCount=tCount=uCount=vCount=wCount=xCount=yCount=zCount=0
print("PROGRAM: Vowel count\n")
aString=input("Please, enter a text string: ")
for eachChar in aString:
 if eachChar in vowels:
 if eachChar == "a": aCount+=1
 if eachChar == "e": eCount+=1
 if eachChar == "i": iCount+=1
 if eachChar == "o": oCount+=1
 if eachChar == "u": uCount+=1
 if eachChar in consonants:
 if eachChar == "b": bCount+=1
 if eachChar == "c": cCount+=1
 if eachChar == "d": dCount+=1
 if eachChar == "f": fCount+=1
 if eachChar == "g": gCount+=1 
 if eachChar == "h": hCount+=1
 if eachChar == "j": jCount+=1
 if eachChar == "k": kCount+=1
 if eachChar == "l": lCount+=1
 if eachChar == "m": mCount+=1
 if eachChar == "n": nCount+=1
 if eachChar == "p": pCount+=1
 if eachChar == "q": qCount+=1
 if eachChar == "r": rCount+=1
 if eachChar == "s": sCount+=1
 if eachChar == "t": tCount+=1
 if eachChar == "v": vCount+=1
 if eachChar == "w": wCount+=1
 if eachChar == "x": xCount+=1 
 if eachChar == "y": yCount+=1
 if eachChar == "z": zCount+=1
print(len(aString),"characters")
print("a","e","i","o","u")
print(aCount,eCount,iCount,oCount,uCount)
print("b","c","d","f","g","h","j","k","l","m","n","p","q","r","s","t","v","w","x","y","z")
print(bCount,cCount,dCount,fCount,gCount,hCount,jCount,kCount,lCount,mCount,nCount,pCount,qCount,rCount,sCount,tCount,vCount,wCount,xCount,yCount,zCount)

• Paul Ramnora: I've gone and corrected the sample output by changing 'upper case' F to become 'lower case' f. Thanks! ;-)

Answer 1

To count the occurrences of things, use collections.Counter.

The lowercase letters are available as a predefined constant string.ascii_lowercase. You can use a generator expression to filter out the vowels and obtain the consonants. PEP 8, the official style guide, suggests using ALL_CAPS as names for constants.

I've used the * operator when calling print() to treat each element of a tuple or list as a separate argument.

Note that your formatting will break when any character has more than 9 occurrences.

from collections import Counter
from string import ascii_lowercase
VOWELS = tuple("aeiou")
CONSONANTS = tuple(c for c in ascii_lowercase if c not in VOWELS)
print("PROGRAM: Vowel count\n")
s = input("Please, enter a text string: ")
counts = Counter(s)
print('{0} characters'.format(len(s)))
print(*VOWELS)
print(*[counts[c] for c in VOWELS])
print(*CONSONANTS)
print(*[counts[c] for c in CONSONANTS])