Code not running properly

Question

The code I have below is supposed to run the number of words that start with a certain letter, but when I run it, the counts are all 0, instead of what they should be: {'I': 2, 'b': 2, 't': 3, 'f': 1}. I appreciate any help. Thanks!

def initialLets(keyStr):
 '''Return a dictionary in which each key is the initial letter of a word in t and the value is the number of words that begin with that letter. Upper
 and lower case letters should be considered different letters.'''
 inLets = {}
 strList = keyStr.split()
 firstLets = []
 for words in strList:
 if words[0] not in firstLets:
 firstLets.append(words[0])
 for lets in firstLets:
 inLets[lets] = strList.count(lets)
 return inLets
text = "I'm born to trouble I'm born to fate"
print(initialLets(text))

Answer 1

You can try this:

text = "I'm born to trouble I'm born to fate"
new_text = text.split()
final_counts = {i[0]:sum(b.startswith(i[0]) for b in new_text) for i in new_text}

Output:

{'I': 2, 'b': 2, 't': 3, 'f': 1}

Answer 2

You don't have a counter as you append the letter but not its number of occurrences.

So to simplify:

def initialLets(keyStr):
 '''Return a dictionary in which each key is the initial letter of a word in t and the value is the number of words that begin with that letter. Upper
 and lower case letters should be considered different letters.'''
 strList = keyStr.split()
 # We initiate the variable that gonna take our results
 result = {}
 for words in strList:
 if words[0] not in result:
 # if first letter not in result then we add it to result with counter = 1
 result[words[0]] = 1
 else:
 # We increase the number of occurence
 result[words[0]] += 1
 return result
text = "I'm born to trouble I'm born to fate"
print(initialLets(text))

Answer 3

Firstly, you are checking if the first letter of the word is in the list before putting it in. That would just make the list comprise of only 1 of each letter. Secondly, your strList is a list of each word, instead of inLets[lets] = strList.count(lets), it should be inLets[lets] = firstLets.count(lets)... While your current code isn't the cleanest way to do it, this minor modification would have worked.

def initialLets(keyStr):
 '''Return a dictionary in which each key is the initial letter of a word in t and the value is the number of words that begin with that letter. Upper
 and lower case letters should be considered different letters.'''
 inLets = {}
 strList = keyStr.split()
 firstLets = []
 for words in strList:
 firstLets.append(words[0])
 for lets in firstLets:
 inLets[lets] = firstLets.count(lets)
 return inLets
text = "I'm born to trouble I'm born to fate"
print(initialLets(text))