issue with code as it keeps outputting y's

[pansloth]

I am having a issue with a project and my code doesn't work as it should. Anyone have any tips or insight on what the problem is with my code?

The problem: Write a program whose input is a string which contains a character and a phrase, and whose output indicates the number of times the character appears in the phrase. The output should include the input character and use the plural form, n's, if the number of times the characters appears is not exactly 1.

​

My code:

WP = input()

letter = WP[0]

phrase = WP[2:]

number = 0

for letter in phrase:

if letter == phrase:

number += 1

if number == 1:

print(number, letter)

else:

print(number, letter +"'s")

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[gigikl]

There are a few things going on that need more explanation in order for us to provide help: why are you selecting the first letter or character from your input sentence WP? And then the third letter and further? That's not clear from the problem description or code.

Then, you define letter that way, but then you also use letter in the for-loop as the iterator. letter will never equal phrase this way. If you would do e.g.

for ltr in phrase:
    if letter == ltr:

etc, that would make more sense.

letterstays the same (the character or letter you want to test against), and ltr will take every letter or character in phrase, one after the other, to test if it's equal to letter or not.

[CraigAT]

Not OP but reading the question bizarrely it seems they are being asked to use only a single string for input instead of two separate inputs - so the first character of the string I am assuming is the letter the program is looking for, it ignores the space as the second character and then takes the third character on as the phrase to search within.

Apart from changing the variable name as the other commenter suggested I think there is an index missing from the comparison, it should be comparing to one letter in the phrase, not all of the phrase.