Count number of special characters [^&$#] appearing in a paragraph

Question

I would like to count the number of special characters [^&*$] appearing in a paragraph using python. Can anyone help me to do this in succinctly? I don't want to use for loop condition.

Answer 1

Counter makes a set of all the characters giving an upper bound to the number of iterations.

Given a string of text:

import string
import collections as ct


special_chars = string.punctuation
sum(v for k, v in ct.Counter(text).items() if k in special_chars)

Replace specials_chars with whatever characters you wish to count.

Answer 2

This might be a duplicate but you can use regex re.sub and len i.e Replace all the word characters \w with '' so you end up with non word characters or special characters.

import re
x = "asdfklsdf#$&^#@!"
new = re.sub('[\w]+' ,'', x)

Output : #$&^#@!

len(new)
7

In case you want to count only those characters then

new = re.sub('[^\^&*$]+' ,'', x)

Answer 3

Using re.findall...

If you have an input string of:

para = "hello #123 ^@"

you can use re.findall to get a list of matches to a regex. So if we use the regex: '[\w]`, we can get a list of all non special chars in the string. Simply then subtract the length of that list from the length of the original string to get the number of special chars:

specialChars = len(para) - len( re.findall('[\w]', para) )

which returns 3 :)