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Python - removing repeated letters in a string

Say I have a string in alphabetical order, based on the amount of times that a letter repeats.
Example: "BBBAADDC".
There are 3 B's, so they go at the start, 2 A's and 2 D's, so the A's go in front of the D's because they are in alphabetical order, and 1 C. Another example would be CCCCAAABBDDAB.
Note that there can be 4 letters in the middle somewhere (i.e. CCCC), as there could be 2 pairs of 2 letters.
However, let's say I can only have n letters in a row. For example, if n = 3 in the second example, then I would have to omit one "C" from the first substring of 4 C's, because there can only be a maximum of 3 of the same letters in a row.
Another example would be the string "CCCDDDAABC"; if n = 2, I would have to remove one C and one D to get the string CCDDAABC
Example input/output:
n=2: Input: AAABBCCCCDE, Output: AABBCCDE
n=4: Input: EEEEEFFFFGGG, Output: EEEEFFFFGGG
n=1: Input: XXYYZZ, Output: XYZ
How can I do this with Python? Thanks in advance!
This is what I have right now, although I'm not sure if it's on the right track. Here, z is the length of the string.
for k in range(z+1):
if final_string[k] == final_string[k+1] == final_string[k+2] == final_string[k+3]:
final_string = final_string.translate({ord(final_string[k]): None})
return final_string

Ok, based on your comment, you're either pre-sorting the string or it doesn't need to be sorted by the function you're trying to create. You can do this more easily with itertools.groupby():
import itertools
def max_seq(text, n=1):
result = []
for k, g in itertools.groupby(text):
result.extend(list(g)[:n])
return ''.join(result)
max_seq('AAABBCCCCDE', 2)
# 'AABBCCDE'
max_seq('EEEEEFFFFGGG', 4)
# 'EEEEFFFFGGG'
max_seq('XXYYZZ')
# 'XYZ'
max_seq('CCCDDDAABC', 2)
# 'CCDDAABC'
In each group g, it's expanded and then sliced until n elements (the [:n] part) so you get each letter at most n times in a row. If the same letter appears elsewhere, it's treated as an independent sequence when counting n in a row.
Edit: Here's a shorter version, which may also perform better for very long strings. And while we're using itertools, this one additionally utilises itertools.chain.from_iterable() to create the flattened list of letters. And since each of these is a generator, it's only evaluated/expanded at the last line:
import itertools
def max_seq(text, n=1):
sequences = (list(g)[:n] for _, g in itertools.groupby(text))
letters = itertools.chain.from_iterable(sequences)
return ''.join(letters)

hello = "hello frrriend"
def replacing() -> str:
global hello
j = 0
for i in hello:
if j == 0:
pass
else:
if i == prev:
hello = hello.replace(i, "")
prev = i
prev = i
j += 1
return hello
replacing()
looks a bit primal but i think it works, thats what i came up with on the go anyways , hope it helps :D

Here's my solution:
def snip_string(string, n):
list_string = list(string)
list_string.sort()
chars = set(string)
for char in chars:
while list_string.count(char) > n:
list_string.remove(char)
return ''.join(list_string)
Calling the function with various values for n gives the following output:
>>> string = "AAAABBBCCCDDD"
>>> snip_string(string, 1)
'ABCD'
>>> snip_string(string, 2)
'AABBCCDD'
>>> snip_string(string, 3)
'AAABBBCCCDDD'
>>>
Edit
Here is the updated version of my solution, which only removes characters if the group of repeated characters exceeds n.
import itertools
def snip_string(string, n):
groups = [list(g) for k, g in itertools.groupby(string)]
string_list = []
for group in groups:
while len(group) > n:
del group[-1]
string_list.extend(group)
return ''.join(string_list)
Output:
>>> string = "DDDAABBBBCCABCDE"
>>> snip_string(string, 3)
'DDDAABBBCCABCDE'

from itertools import groupby
n = 2
def rem(string):
out = "".join(["".join(list(g)[:n]) for _, g in groupby(string)])
print(out)
So this is the entire code for your question.
s = "AABBCCDDEEE"
s2 = "AAAABBBDDDDDDD"
s3 = "CCCCAAABBDDABBB"
s4 = "AAAAAAAA"
z = "AAABBCCCCDE"
With following test:
AABBCCDDEE
AABBDD
CCAABBDDABB
AA
AABBCCDE

Count of sub-strings that contain character X at least once. E.g Input: str = “abcd”, X = ‘b’ Output: 6

This question was asked in an exam but my code (given below) passed just 2 cases out of 7 cases.
Input Format : single line input seperated by comma
Input: str = “abcd,b”
Output: 6
“ab”, “abc”, “abcd”, “b”, “bc” and “bcd” are the required sub-strings.
def slicing(s, k, n):
loop_value = n - k + 1
res = []
for i in range(loop_value):
res.append(s[i: i + k])
return res
x, y = input().split(',')
n = len(x)
res1 = []
for i in range(1, n + 1):
res1 += slicing(x, i, n)
count = 0
for ele in res1:
if y in ele:
count += 1
print(count)

When the target string (ts) is found in the string S, you can compute the number of substrings containing that instance by multiplying the number of characters before the target by the number of characters after the target (plus one on each side).
This will cover all substrings that contain this instance of the target string leaving only the "after" part to analyse further, which you can do recursively.
def countsubs(S,ts):
if ts not in S: return 0 # shorter or no match
before,after = S.split(ts,1) # split on target
result = (len(before)+1)*(len(after)+1) # count for this instance
return result + countsubs(ts[1:]+after,ts) # recurse with right side
print(countsubs("abcd","b")) # 6
This will work for single character and multi-character targets and will run much faster than checking all combinations of substrings one by one.

Here is a simple solution without recursion:
def my_function(s):
l, target = s.split(',')
result = []
for i in range(len(l)):
for j in range(i+1, len(l)+1):
ss = l[i] + l[i+1:j]
if target in ss:
result.append(ss)
return f'count = {len(result)}, substrings = {result}'
print(my_function("abcd,b"))
#count = 6, substrings = ['ab', 'abc', 'abcd', 'b', 'bc', 'bcd']

Here you go, this should help
from itertools import combinations
output = []
initial = input('Enter string and needed letter seperated by commas: ') #Asking for input
list1 = initial.split(',') #splitting the input into two parts i.e the actual text and the letter we want common in output
text = list1[0]
final = [''.join(l) for i in range(len(text)) for l in combinations(text, i+1)] #this is the core part of our code, from this statement we get all the available combinations of the set of letters (all the way from 1 letter combinations to nth letter)
for i in final:
if 'b' in i:
output.append(i) #only outputting the results which have the required letter/phrase in it

Finding repeated character combinations in string

I have a string that holds a very long sentence without whitespaces/spaces.
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
I would like to find all of the repeated substrings that contains minimum 4 chars.
So I would like to achieve something like this:
'text' 2 times
'sample' 2 times
'abcd' 2 times
As both abcd,text and sample can be found two times in the mystring they were recognized as properly matched substrings with more than 4 char length. It's important that I am seeking repeated substrings, finding only existing English words is not a requirement.
The answers I found are helpful for finding duplicates in texts with whitespaces, but I couldn't find a proper resource that covers the situation when there are no spaces and whitespaces in the string. How can this be done in the most efficient way?

Let's go through this step by step. There are several sub-tasks you should take care of:
Identify all substrings of length 4 or more.
Count the occurrence of these substrings.
Filter all substrings with 2 occurrences or more.
You can actually put all of them into a few statements. For understanding, it is easier to go through them one at a time.
The following examples all use
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
min_length = 4
1. Substrings of a given length
You can easily get substrings by slicing - for example, mystring[4:4+6] gives you the substring from position 4 of length 6: 'thisis'. More generically, you want substrings of the form mystring[start:start+length].
So what values do you need for start and length?
start must...
cover all substrings, so it must include the first character: start in range(0, ...).
not map to short substrings, so it can stop min_length characters before the end: start in range(..., len(mystring) - min_length + 1).
length must...
cover the shortest substring of length 4: length in range(min_length, ...).
not exceed the remaining string after i: length in range(..., len(mystring) - i + 1))
The +1 terms come from converting lengths (>=1) to indices (>=0).
You can put this all together into a single comprehension:
substrings = [
mystring[i:i+j]
for i in range(0, len(mystring) - min_length + 1)
for j in range(min_length, len(mystring) - i + 1)
]
2. Count substrings
Trivially, you want to keep a count for each substring. Keeping anything for each specific object is what dicts are made for. So you should use substrings as keys and counts as values in a dict. In essence, this corresponds to this:
counts = {}
for substring in substrings:
try: # increase count for existing keys, set for new keys
counts[substring] += 1
except KeyError:
counts[substring] = 1
You can simply feed your substrings to collections.Counter, and it produces something like the above.
>>> counts = collections.Counter(substrings)
>>> print(counts)
Counter({'abcd': 2, 'abcdt': 1, 'abcdth': 1, 'abcdthi': 1, 'abcdthis': 1, ...})
Notice how the duplicate 'abcd' maps to the count of 2.
3. Filtering duplicate substrings
So now you have your substrings and the count for each. You need to remove the non-duplicate substrings - those with a count of 1.
Python offers several constructs for filtering, depending on the output you want. These work also if counts is a regular dict:
>>> list(filter(lambda key: counts[key] > 1, counts))
['abcd', 'text', 'samp', 'sampl', 'sample', 'ampl', 'ample', 'mple']
>>> {key: value for key, value in counts.items() if value > 1}
{'abcd': 2, 'ampl': 2, 'ample': 2, 'mple': 2, 'samp': 2, 'sampl': 2, 'sample': 2, 'text': 2}
Using Python primitives
Python ships with primitives that allow you to do this more efficiently.
Use a generator to build substrings. A generator builds its member on the fly, so you never actually have them all in-memory. For your use case, you can use a generator expression:
substrings = (
mystring[i:i+j]
for i in range(0, len(mystring) - min_length + 1)
for j in range(min_length, len(mystring) - i + 1)
)
Use a pre-existing Counter implementation. Python comes with a dict-like container that counts its members: collections.Counter can directly digest your substring generator. Especially in newer version, this is much more efficient.
counts = collections.Counter(substrings)
You can exploit Python's lazy filters to only ever inspect one substring. The filter builtin or another generator generator expression can produce one result at a time without storing them all in memory.
for substring in filter(lambda key: counts[key] > 1, counts):
print(substring, 'occurs', counts[substring], 'times')

Nobody is using re! Time for an answer [ab]using the regular expression built-in module ;)
import re
Finding all the maximal substrings that are repeated
repeated_ones = set(re.findall(r"(.{4,})(?=.*\1)", mystring))
This matches the longest substrings which have at least a single repetition after (without consuming). So it finds all disjointed substrings that are repeated while only yielding the longest strings.
Finding all substrings that are repeated, including overlaps
mystring_overlap = "abcdeabcdzzzzbcde"
# In case we want to match both abcd and bcde
repeated_ones = set()
pos = 0
while True:
match = re.search(r"(.{4,}).*(\1)+", mystring_overlap[pos:])
if match:
repeated_ones.add(match.group(1))
pos += match.pos + 1
else:
break
This ensures that all --not only disjoint-- substrings which have repetition are returned. It should be much slower, but gets the work done.
If you want in addition to the longest strings that are repeated, all the substrings, then:
base_repetitions = list(repeated_ones)
for s in base_repetitions:
for i in range(4, len(s)):
repeated_ones.add(s[:i])
That will ensure that for long substrings that have repetition, you have also the smaller substring --e.g. "sample" and "ample" found by the re.search code; but also "samp", "sampl", "ampl" added by the above snippet.
Counting matches
Because (by design) the substrings that we count are non-overlapping, the count method is the way to go:
from __future__ import print_function
for substr in repeated_ones:
print("'%s': %d times" % (substr, mystring.count(substr)))
Results
Finding maximal substrings:
With the question's original mystring:
{'abcd', 'text', 'sample'}
with the mystring_overlap sample:
{'abcd'}
Finding all substrings:
With the question's original mystring:
{'abcd', 'ample', 'mple', 'sample', 'text'}
... and if we add the code to get all substrings then, of course, we get absolutely all the substrings:
{'abcd', 'ampl', 'ample', 'mple', 'samp', 'sampl', 'sample', 'text'}
with the mystring_overlap sample:
{'abcd', 'bcde'}
Future work
It's possible to filter the results of the finding all substrings with the following steps:
take a match "A"
check if this match is a substring of another match, call it "B"
if there is a "B" match, check the counter on that match "B_n"
if "A_n = B_n", then remove A
go to first step
It cannot happen that "A_n < B_n" because A is smaller than B (is a substring) so there must be at least the same number of repetitions.
If "A_n > B_n" it means that there is some extra match of the smaller substring, so it is a distinct substring because it is repeated in a place where B is not repeated.

Script (explanation where needed, in comments):
from collections import Counter
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
mystring_len = len(mystring)
possible_matches = []
matches = []
# Range `start_index` from 0 to 3 from the left, due to minimum char count of 4
for start_index in range(0, mystring_len-3):
# Start `end_index` at `start_index+1` and range it throughout the rest of
# the string
for end_index in range(start_index+1, mystring_len+1):
current_string = mystring[start_index:end_index]
if len(current_string) < 4: continue # Skip this interation, if len < 4
possible_matches.append(mystring[start_index:end_index])
for possible_match, count in Counter(possible_matches).most_common():
# Iterate until count is less than or equal to 1 because `Counter`'s
# `most_common` method lists them in order. Once 1 (or less) is hit, all
# others are the same or lower.
if count <= 1: break
matches.append((possible_match, count))
for match, count in matches:
print(f'\'{match}\' {count} times')
Output:
'abcd' 2 times
'text' 2 times
'samp' 2 times
'sampl' 2 times
'sample' 2 times
'ampl' 2 times
'ample' 2 times
'mple' 2 times

Here's a Python3 friendly solution:
from collections import Counter
min_str_length = 4
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
all_substrings =[mystring[start_index:][:end_index + 1] for start_index in range(len(mystring)) for end_index in range(len(mystring[start_index:]))]
counted_substrings = Counter(all_substrings)
not_counted_final_candidates = [item[0] for item in counted_substrings.most_common() if item[1] > 1 and len(item[0]) >= min_str_length]
counted_final_candidates = {item: counted_substrings[item] for item in not_counted_final_candidates}
print(counted_final_candidates)
Bonus: largest string
sub_sub_strings = [substring1 for substring1 in not_counted_final_candidates for substring2 in not_counted_final_candidates if substring1!=substring2 and substring1 in substring2 ]
largest_common_string = list(set(not_counted_final_candidates) - set(sub_sub_strings))
Everything as a function:
from collections import Counter
def get_repeated_strings(input_string, min_str_length = 2, calculate_largest_repeated_string = True ):
all_substrings = [input_string[start_index:][:end_index + 1]
for start_index in range(len(input_string))
for end_index in range(len(input_string[start_index:]))]
counted_substrings = Counter(all_substrings)
not_counted_final_candidates = [item[0]
for item in counted_substrings.most_common()
if item[1] > 1 and len(item[0]) >= min_str_length]
counted_final_candidates = {item: counted_substrings[item] for item in not_counted_final_candidates}
### This is just a bit of bonus code for calculating the largest repeating sting
if calculate_largest_repeated_string == True:
sub_sub_strings = [substring1 for substring1 in not_counted_final_candidates for substring2 in
not_counted_final_candidates if substring1 != substring2 and substring1 in substring2]
largest_common_strings = list(set(not_counted_final_candidates) - set(sub_sub_strings))
return counted_final_candidates, largest_common_strings
else:
return counted_final_candidates
Example:
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
print(get_repeated_strings(mystring, min_str_length= 4))
Output:
({'abcd': 2, 'text': 2, 'samp': 2, 'sampl': 2, 'sample': 2, 'ampl': 2, 'ample': 2, 'mple': 2}, ['abcd', 'text', 'sample'])

CODE:
pattern = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
string_more_4 = []
k = 4
while(k <= len(pattern)):
for i in range(len(pattern)):
if pattern[i:k+i] not in string_more_4 and len(pattern[i:k+i]) >= 4:
string_more_4.append( pattern[i:k+i])
k+=1
for i in string_more_4:
if pattern.count(i) >= 2:
print(i + " -> " + str(pattern.count(i)) + " times")
OUTPUT:
abcd -> 2 times
text -> 2 times
samp -> 2 times
ampl -> 2 times
mple -> 2 times
sampl -> 2 times
ample -> 2 times
sample -> 2 times
Hope this helps as my code length was short and it is easy to understand. Cheers!

This is in Python 2 because I'm not doing Python 3 at this time. So you'll have to adapt it to Python 3 yourself.
#!python2
# import module
from collections import Counter
# get the indices
def getIndices(length):
# holds the indices
specific_range = []; all_sets = []
# start building the indices
for i in range(0, length - 2):
# build a set of indices of a specific range
for j in range(1, length + 2):
specific_range.append([j - 1, j + i + 3])
# append 'specific_range' to 'all_sets', reset 'specific_range'
if specific_range[j - 1][1] == length:
all_sets.append(specific_range)
specific_range = []
break
# return all of the calculated indices ranges
return all_sets
# store search strings
tmplst = []; combos = []; found = []
# string to be searched
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
# mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithtextsampletextforasampleabcdtext"
# get length of string
length = len(mystring)
# get all of the indices ranges, 4 and greater
all_sets = getIndices(length)
# get the search string combinations
for sublst in all_sets:
for subsublst in sublst:
tmplst.append(mystring[subsublst[0]: subsublst[1]])
combos.append(tmplst)
tmplst = []
# search for matching string patterns
for sublst in all_sets:
for subsublst in sublst:
for sublstitems in combos:
if mystring[subsublst[0]: subsublst[1]] in sublstitems:
found.append(mystring[subsublst[0]: subsublst[1]])
# make a dictionary containing the strings and their counts
d1 = Counter(found)
# filter out counts of 2 or more and print them
for k, v in d1.items():
if v > 1:
print k, v

$ cat test.py
import collections
import sys
S = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
def find(s, min_length=4):
"""
Find repeated character sequences in a provided string.
Arguments:
s -- the string to be searched
min_length -- the minimum length of the sequences to be found
"""
counter = collections.defaultdict(int)
# A repeated sequence can't be longer than half the length of s
sequence_length = len(s) // 2
# populate counter with all possible sequences
while sequence_length >= min_length:
# Iterate over the string until the number of remaining characters is
# fewer than the length of the current sequence.
for i, x in enumerate(s[:-(sequence_length - 1)]):
# Window across the string, getting slices
# of length == sequence_length.
candidate = s[i:i + sequence_length]
counter[candidate] += 1
sequence_length -= 1
# Report.
for k, v in counter.items():
if v > 1:
print('{} {} times'.format(k, v))
return
if __name__ == '__main__':
try:
s = sys.argv[1]
except IndexError:
s = S
find(s)
$ python test.py
sample 2 times
sampl 2 times
ample 2 times
abcd 2 times
text 2 times
samp 2 times
ampl 2 times
mple 2 times

This is my approach to this problem:
def get_repeated_words(string, minimum_len):
# Storing count of repeated words in this dictionary
repeated_words = {}
# Traversing till last but 4th element
# Actually leaving `minimum_len` elements at end (in this case its 4)
for i in range(len(string)-minimum_len):
# Starting with a length of 4(`minimum_len`) and going till end of string
for j in range(i+minimum_len, len(string)):
# getting the current word
word = string[i:j]
# counting the occurrences of the word
word_count = string.count(word)
if word_count > 1:
# storing in dictionary along with its count if found more than once
repeated_words[word] = word_count
return repeated_words
if __name__ == '__main__':
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
result = get_repeated_words(mystring, 4)

This is how I would do it, but I don't know any other way:
string = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
l = len(string)
occurences = {}
for i in range(4, l):
for start in range(l - i):
substring = string[start:start + i]
occurences[substring] = occurences.get(substring, 0) + 1
for key in occurences.keys():
if occurences[key] > 1:
print("'" + key + "'", str(occurences[key]), "times")
Output:
'sample' 2 times
'ampl' 2 times
'sampl' 2 times
'ample' 2 times
'samp' 2 times
'mple' 2 times
'text' 2 times
Efficient, no, but easy to understand, yes.

Here is simple solution using the more_itertools library.
Given
import collections as ct
import more_itertools as mit
s = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
lbound, ubound = len("abcd"), len(s)
Code
windows = mit.flatten(mit.windowed(s, n=i) for i in range(lbound, ubound))
filtered = {"".join(k): v for k, v in ct.Counter(windows).items() if v > 1}
filtered
Output
{'abcd': 2,
'text': 2,
'samp': 2,
'ampl': 2,
'mple': 2,
'sampl': 2,
'ample': 2,
'sample': 2}
Details
The procedures are:
build sliding windows of varying sizes lbound <= n < ubound
count all occurrences and filter replicates
more_itertools is a third-party package installed by > pip install more_itertools.

s = 'abcabcabcdabcd'
d = {}
def get_repeats(s, l):
for i in range(len(s)-l):
ss = s[i: i+l]
if ss not in d:
d[ss] = 1
else:
d[ss] = d[ss]+1
return d
get_repeats(s, 3)

How to return most repeated letter in python?

I've done some digging and most use arrays, but our class is not that far and we're to use mostly for loops to return the most repeated letter in a function.
Here was my code so far, but all I could get was to return the count of the first letter.
def most_repeated_letters(word_1):
x = 0
z = 0
for letter in word_1:
y = word_1.count(letter[0:])
if y > z:
z = y
x += 1
return z
print most_repeated_letters('jackaby')

Make use collections.Counter
from collections import Counter
c = Counter('jackaby').most_common(1)
print(c)
# [('a', 2)]

There are a few problems with your code:
you calculate the count of the most common letter, but not the letter itself
you return inside the loop and thus after the very first letter
also, you never use x, and the slicing of letter is unneccesary
Some suggestions to better spot those errors yourself:
use more meaningful variable names
use more than two spaces for indentation
Fixing those, your code might look something like this:
def most_repeated_letters(word_1):
most_common_count = 0
most_common_letter = None
for letter in word_1:
count = word_1.count(letter)
if count > most_common_count:
most_common_count = count
most_common_letter = letter
return most_common_letter
Once you are comfortable with Python's basic language features, you should have a closer look at the builtin functions. In fact, your entire function can be reduced to a single line using max, using the word_1.count as the key function for comparison.
def most_repeated_letters(word_1):
return max(word_1, key=word_1.count)
But while this is very short, it is not very efficient, as the count function is called for each letter in the word, giving the function quadratic complexity O(n²). Instead, you can use a dict to store counts of individual letters and increase those counts in a single pass over the word in O(n).
def most_repeated_letters(word_1):
counts = {}
for letter in word_1:
if letter not in counts:
counts[letter] = 1
else:
counts[letter] += 1
return max(counts, key=counts.get)
And this is basically the same as what collections.Counter would do, as already described in another answer.

If you don't want to use Counter:
def most_repeated_letters(word_1):
lettersCount = {}
for ch in word_1:
if ch not in lettersCount:
lettersCount[ch] = 1
else:
lettersCount[ch] += 1
return max(lettersCount, key=lettersCount.get)
print(most_repeated_letters('jackabybb'))

Here is a code that works for multiple:
def most_repeated_letters(word_1):
d = {}
for letter in word_1:
if not d.get(letter):
d[letter] = 0
d[letter] = d.get(letter) + 1
ret = {}
for k,v in d.iteritems():
if d[k] == max(d.values()):
ret[k] = v
return ret
most_repeated_letters('jackaby')

If you don’t want to use the collections modue :
def mostRepeatedLetter(text):
counter = {}
for letter in text:
if letter in counter:
counter[letter]+=1
else:
counter[letter]=1
max = { letter: 0, quantity: 0 }
for key, value in counter.items():
if value > max.quantity:
max.letter, max.quantity = key, value
return max

How to find all occurrences of a substring?

Python has string.find() and string.rfind() to get the index of a substring in a string.
I'm wondering whether there is something like string.find_all() which can return all found indexes (not only the first from the beginning or the first from the end).
For example:
string = "test test test test"
print string.find('test') # 0
print string.rfind('test') # 15
#this is the goal
print string.find_all('test') # [0,5,10,15]
For counting the occurrences, see Count number of occurrences of a substring in a string.

There is no simple built-in string function that does what you're looking for, but you could use the more powerful regular expressions:
import re
[m.start() for m in re.finditer('test', 'test test test test')]
#[0, 5, 10, 15]
If you want to find overlapping matches, lookahead will do that:
[m.start() for m in re.finditer('(?=tt)', 'ttt')]
#[0, 1]
If you want a reverse find-all without overlaps, you can combine positive and negative lookahead into an expression like this:
search = 'tt'
[m.start() for m in re.finditer('(?=%s)(?!.{1,%d}%s)' % (search, len(search)-1, search), 'ttt')]
#[1]
re.finditer returns a generator, so you could change the [] in the above to () to get a generator instead of a list which will be more efficient if you're only iterating through the results once.

>>> help(str.find)
Help on method_descriptor:
find(...)
S.find(sub [,start [,end]]) -> int
Thus, we can build it ourselves:
def find_all(a_str, sub):
start = 0
while True:
start = a_str.find(sub, start)
if start == -1: return
yield start
start += len(sub) # use start += 1 to find overlapping matches
list(find_all('spam spam spam spam', 'spam')) # [0, 5, 10, 15]
No temporary strings or regexes required.

Here's a (very inefficient) way to get all (i.e. even overlapping) matches:
>>> string = "test test test test"
>>> [i for i in range(len(string)) if string.startswith('test', i)]
[0, 5, 10, 15]

Use re.finditer:
import re
sentence = input("Give me a sentence ")
word = input("What word would you like to find ")
for match in re.finditer(word, sentence):
print (match.start(), match.end())
For word = "this" and sentence = "this is a sentence this this" this will yield the output:
(0, 4)
(19, 23)
(24, 28)

Again, old thread, but here's my solution using a generator and plain str.find.
def findall(p, s):
'''Yields all the positions of
the pattern p in the string s.'''
i = s.find(p)
while i != -1:
yield i
i = s.find(p, i+1)
Example
x = 'banananassantana'
[(i, x[i:i+2]) for i in findall('na', x)]
returns
[(2, 'na'), (4, 'na'), (6, 'na'), (14, 'na')]

You can use re.finditer() for non-overlapping matches.
>>> import re
>>> aString = 'this is a string where the substring "is" is repeated several times'
>>> print [(a.start(), a.end()) for a in list(re.finditer('is', aString))]
[(2, 4), (5, 7), (38, 40), (42, 44)]
but won't work for:
In [1]: aString="ababa"
In [2]: print [(a.start(), a.end()) for a in list(re.finditer('aba', aString))]
Output: [(0, 3)]

Come, let us recurse together.
def locations_of_substring(string, substring):
"""Return a list of locations of a substring."""
substring_length = len(substring)
def recurse(locations_found, start):
location = string.find(substring, start)
if location != -1:
return recurse(locations_found + [location], location+substring_length)
else:
return locations_found
return recurse([], 0)
print(locations_of_substring('this is a test for finding this and this', 'this'))
# prints [0, 27, 36]
No need for regular expressions this way.

If you're just looking for a single character, this would work:
string = "dooobiedoobiedoobie"
match = 'o'
reduce(lambda count, char: count + 1 if char == match else count, string, 0)
# produces 7
Also,
string = "test test test test"
match = "test"
len(string.split(match)) - 1
# produces 4
My hunch is that neither of these (especially #2) is terribly performant.

this is an old thread but i got interested and wanted to share my solution.
def find_all(a_string, sub):
result = []
k = 0
while k < len(a_string):
k = a_string.find(sub, k)
if k == -1:
return result
else:
result.append(k)
k += 1 #change to k += len(sub) to not search overlapping results
return result
It should return a list of positions where the substring was found.
Please comment if you see an error or room for improvment.

This does the trick for me using re.finditer
import re
text = 'This is sample text to test if this pythonic '\
'program can serve as an indexing platform for '\
'finding words in a paragraph. It can give '\
'values as to where the word is located with the '\
'different examples as stated'
# find all occurances of the word 'as' in the above text
find_the_word = re.finditer('as', text)
for match in find_the_word:
print('start {}, end {}, search string \'{}\''.
format(match.start(), match.end(), match.group()))

This thread is a little old but this worked for me:
numberString = "onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightninefiveten"
testString = "five"
marker = 0
while marker < len(numberString):
try:
print(numberString.index("five",marker))
marker = numberString.index("five", marker) + 1
except ValueError:
print("String not found")
marker = len(numberString)

You can try :
>>> string = "test test test test"
>>> for index,value in enumerate(string):
if string[index:index+(len("test"))] == "test":
print index
0
5
10
15

You can try :
import re
str1 = "This dress looks good; you have good taste in clothes."
substr = "good"
result = [_.start() for _ in re.finditer(substr, str1)]
# result = [17, 32]

When looking for a large amount of key words in a document, use flashtext
from flashtext import KeywordProcessor
words = ['test', 'exam', 'quiz']
txt = 'this is a test'
kwp = KeywordProcessor()
kwp.add_keywords_from_list(words)
result = kwp.extract_keywords(txt, span_info=True)
Flashtext runs faster than regex on large list of search words.

This function does not look at all positions inside the string, it does not waste compute resources. My try:
def findAll(string,word):
all_positions=[]
next_pos=-1
while True:
next_pos=string.find(word,next_pos+1)
if(next_pos<0):
break
all_positions.append(next_pos)
return all_positions
to use it call it like this:
result=findAll('this word is a big word man how many words are there?','word')

src = input() # we will find substring in this string
sub = input() # substring
res = []
pos = src.find(sub)
while pos != -1:
res.append(pos)
pos = src.find(sub, pos + 1)

Whatever the solutions provided by others are completely based on the available method find() or any available methods.
What is the core basic algorithm to find all the occurrences of a
substring in a string?
def find_all(string,substring):
"""
Function: Returning all the index of substring in a string
Arguments: String and the search string
Return:Returning a list
"""
length = len(substring)
c=0
indexes = []
while c < len(string):
if string[c:c+length] == substring:
indexes.append(c)
c=c+1
return indexes
You can also inherit str class to new class and can use this function
below.
class newstr(str):
def find_all(string,substring):
"""
Function: Returning all the index of substring in a string
Arguments: String and the search string
Return:Returning a list
"""
length = len(substring)
c=0
indexes = []
while c < len(string):
if string[c:c+length] == substring:
indexes.append(c)
c=c+1
return indexes
Calling the method
newstr.find_all('Do you find this answer helpful? then upvote
this!','this')

This is solution of a similar question from hackerrank. I hope this could help you.
import re
a = input()
b = input()
if b not in a:
print((-1,-1))
else:
#create two list as
start_indc = [m.start() for m in re.finditer('(?=' + b + ')', a)]
for i in range(len(start_indc)):
print((start_indc[i], start_indc[i]+len(b)-1))
Output:
aaadaa
aa
(0, 1)
(1, 2)
(4, 5)

Here's a solution that I came up with, using assignment expression (new feature since Python 3.8):
string = "test test test test"
phrase = "test"
start = -1
result = [(start := string.find(phrase, start + 1)) for _ in range(string.count(phrase))]
Output:
[0, 5, 10, 15]

I think the most clean way of solution is without libraries and yields:
def find_all_occurrences(string, sub):
index_of_occurrences = []
current_index = 0
while True:
current_index = string.find(sub, current_index)
if current_index == -1:
return index_of_occurrences
else:
index_of_occurrences.append(current_index)
current_index += len(sub)
find_all_occurrences(string, substr)
Note: find() method returns -1 when it can't find anything

The pythonic way would be:
mystring = 'Hello World, this should work!'
find_all = lambda c,s: [x for x in range(c.find(s), len(c)) if c[x] == s]
# s represents the search string
# c represents the character string
find_all(mystring,'o') # will return all positions of 'o'
[4, 7, 20, 26]
>>>

if you only want to use numpy here is a solution
import numpy as np
S= "test test test test"
S2 = 'test'
inds = np.cumsum([len(k)+len(S2) for k in S.split(S2)[:-1]])- len(S2)
print(inds)

if you want to use without re(regex) then:
find_all = lambda _str,_w : [ i for i in range(len(_str)) if _str.startswith(_w,i) ]
string = "test test test test"
print( find_all(string, 'test') ) # >>> [0, 5, 10, 15]

please look at below code
#!/usr/bin/env python
# coding:utf-8
'''黄哥Python'''
def get_substring_indices(text, s):
result = [i for i in range(len(text)) if text.startswith(s, i)]
return result
if __name__ == '__main__':
text = "How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?"
s = 'wood'
print get_substring_indices(text, s)

def find_index(string, let):
enumerated = [place for place, letter in enumerate(string) if letter == let]
return enumerated
for example :
find_index("hey doode find d", "d")
returns:
[4, 7, 13, 15]

Not exactly what OP asked but you could also use the split function to get a list of where all the substrings don't occur. OP didn't specify the end goal of the code but if your goal is to remove the substrings anyways then this could be a simple one-liner. There are probably more efficient ways to do this with larger strings; regular expressions would be preferable in that case
# Extract all non-substrings
s = "an-example-string"
s_no_dash = s.split('-')
# >>> s_no_dash
# ['an', 'example', 'string']
# Or extract and join them into a sentence
s_no_dash2 = ' '.join(s.split('-'))
# >>> s_no_dash2
# 'an example string'
Did a brief skim of other answers so apologies if this is already up there.

def count_substring(string, sub_string):
c=0
for i in range(0,len(string)-2):
if string[i:i+len(sub_string)] == sub_string:
c+=1
return c
if __name__ == '__main__':
string = input().strip()
sub_string = input().strip()
count = count_substring(string, sub_string)
print(count)

I runned in the same problem and did this:
hw = 'Hello oh World!'
list_hw = list(hw)
o_in_hw = []
while True:
o = hw.find('o')
if o != -1:
o_in_hw.append(o)
list_hw[o] = ' '
hw = ''.join(list_hw)
else:
print(o_in_hw)
break
Im pretty new at coding so you can probably simplify it (and if planned to used continuously of course make it a function).
All and all it works as intended for what i was doing.
Edit: Please consider this is for single characters only, and it will change your variable, so you have to create a copy of the string in a new variable to save it, i didnt put it in the code cause its easy and its only to show how i made it work.

By slicing we find all the combinations possible and append them in a list and find the number of times it occurs using count function
s=input()
n=len(s)
l=[]
f=input()
print(s[0])
for i in range(0,n):
for j in range(1,n+1):
l.append(s[i:j])
if f in l:
print(l.count(f))

To find all the occurence of a character in a give string and return as a dictionary
eg: hello
result :
{'h':1, 'e':1, 'l':2, 'o':1}
def count(string):
result = {}
if(string):
for i in string:
result[i] = string.count(i)
return result
return {}
or else you do like this
from collections import Counter
def count(string):
return Counter(string)