Why does this function to count characters in a file always return 0?

Question

I have been trying to define a function that gets 2 inputs (a character and a file path) and returns the amount of times the character appears in it. I know there is a shorter way to do this with the method.count but I would like to know why this function always returns 0.

def lettercount(character , path):
    with open("bear.txt") as myfile:
        counter = [obj for obj in myfile if obj==character]
        return len(counter)

Answer 1

When you iterate over a file (myfile), you get lines (obj). So obj==character will only ever be true if the last line of a file is character and there's no trailing newline.

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To iterate over characters, you can add another loop to your comprehension:

c for line in myfile for c in line if c==character

Although, you don't actually need to keep the characters themselves since you only need their count. You can use sum() like this:

count = sum(c==character for line in myfile for c in line)
return count