How to keep count in a recursive function?

Question

I wrote a recursive function to find the number of instances of a substring in the parent string.

The way I am keeping count is by declaring/initialising count

Answer 1

I'm doing this course on OpenCourseware, it's great. Anyways, this is what I did. I took inspiration from adamse above.

def countSubStringMatchRecursive(target, key, counter = 0):
    if find(target,key) == 0:
        countSubStringMatchRecursive(target[1:], key, counter + 1)
    elif find(target,key) > 0:
        countSubStringMatchRecursive(target[1:], key, counter)
    elif find(target,key) == -1:
        print counter