What is the preferred way to count the number of ocurrences of a certain character in a string?

Question

How do I do this without string.count(), because it is listed as deprecated in Python v2.7.3 documentation?

I am unable to find what I should use instea

Answer 1

This works fine in 2.7.3

>>> strs='aabbccddaa'
>>> strs.count('a')
4