What does print(s.count('an')) print? Python Data Types, Numbers and Strings

Answer, B. 2

A. 6

Counts individual matching letters instead of occurrences of the whole two letter substring.

B. 2

Correct. count scans the string from left to right and counts every non overlapping occurrence of the substring.

C. 1

Stops after finding the first occurrence instead of continuing to scan the rest of the string.

D. 3

Counts overlapping occurrences of the pattern as if each shifted starting position counted separately.

The count method finds every non overlapping occurrence of a substring, moving its search position past the end of each match before looking for the next one. It never counts a match that shares characters with a match it already found.