How to count the number of letters in a string without the spaces?

Question

This is my solution resulting in an error. Returns 0

PS: I\'d still love a fix to my code :)

from collections import Counter
import          


        

Answer 1

OK, if that's what you want, here's what I would do to fix your existing code:

from collections import Counter

def count_letters(words):
    counter = Counter()
    for word in words.split():
        counter.update(word)
    return sum(counter.itervalues())

words = "The grey old fox is an idiot"
print count_letters(words)  # 22

If you don't want to count certain non-whitespace characters, then you'll need to remove them -- inside the for loop if not sooner.