Counting how many chars equal to a given char are in the beginning of a string

Bengt Richter bokr at oz.net
Tue Dec 23 07:57:47 EST 2003


On 22 Dec 2003 12:04:21 -0800, andreif at mail.dntis.ro (Stormbringer) wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Given a string s and a char c, is there a short & elegant way to
>determine how many consecutive occurences of c are in the beginning of
>s ?
>
>For example if s = ">>>>message1" and c = ">" then the number I am
>looking for is 4 (the string begins with 4 '>').
>
Not tested beyond this example ;-)

 >>> def countleading(c, s): return len(s)-len(s.lstrip(c))
 ...
 >>> s = ">>>>message1"
 >>> countleading('>', s)
 4

Regards,
Bengt Richter




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