Now that we are iterating through strings, we can really explore the potential of strings. When we iterate through a string we do something with each character. By including conditional statements inside of these iterations, we can start to do some really cool stuff.

Take a look at the following code:

favorite_fruit = "blueberry"
counter = 0
for character in favorite_fruit:
  if character == "b":
    counter = counter + 1
print(counter)

This code will count the number of bs in the string “blueberry” (hint: it’s two). Let’s take a moment and break down what exactly this code is doing.

First, we define our string, favorite_fruit, and a variable called counter, which we set equal to zero. Then the for loop will iterate through each character in favorite_fruit and compare it to the letter b.

Each time a character equals b the code will increase the variable counter by one. Then, once all characters have been checked, the code will print the counter, telling us how many bs were in “blueberry”. This is a great example of how iterating through a string can be used to solve a specific application, in this case counting a certain letter in a word.