String count with overlapping occurrences

Question

What\'s the best way to count the number of occurrences of a given string, including overlap in Python? This is one way:

def function(string, str_to_search_f         


        

Answer 1

A fairly pythonic way would be to use list comprehension here, although it probably wouldn't be the most efficient.

sequence = 'abaaadcaaaa'
substr = 'aa'

counts = sum([
    sequence.startswith(substr, i) for i in range(len(sequence))
])
print(counts)  # 5

The list would be [False, False, True, False, False, False, True, True, False, False] as it checks all indexes through the string, and because int(True) == 1, sum gives us the total number of matches.