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

How about this?

def count_it(target, key):
    index = target.find(key)
    if index >= 0:
        return 1 + count_it(target[index+len(key):], key)
    else:
        return 0


print count_it("aaa bbb aaa ccc aaa", "aaa")

Output:

3