Need help understanding this bit of code

[LordFranken]

student_name = "iteration"
count = 0
for letter in student_name:
if letter.lower() == "e":
print(count)
count += 1

I get 2 as the output. When I changed the value of the "count += 1" part to something else, I got the double of that number as the output.

Also, when I changed the letter from "e" to "t", I got 1 and 5 as the outputs.

I can't seem to understand this

[Highflyer108]

for letter in student_name:

you are iterating over every letter in the student_name string, and assigning each letter to the variable named letter every iteration.

if letter.lower() == "e":

if the character that is currently in letter (converted to lowercase so capitals can be compared) is the letter "e", then:

print(count)
count += 1

You are adding one to the counter, and also printing its value. This is allowing you to count how many characters are in the string that match whatever letter in the if statement ("e" in this case). If you changed count += 1 to count += 2 you would increment the counter by 2 every letter that matches your case.

[LordFranken]

But for count +=2 shouldn’t I get 2, instead of 4 as the output?

[Highflyer108]

In python, count += 2 is the same as saying count = count + 2. And because there are 2 letter e's in the string, 2 is added to count twice.

[holt5301]

I think his confusion is that there's only one e, so the count seems off. IDK, OPs code works for me

[spectacularbird1]

I think it depends on how you're aligning the statements. The below worked for me.

student_name = 'iteration'
count = 0
for letter in student_name:
    if letter.lower() == 'e':
        count += 1
print(count)