Count Vowels in List in Python (3 Examples)
In this Python tutorial, you’ll learn how to count the total number of vowels in a list.
The tutorial is structured as follows:
Let’s dive right in!
Create Sample List
For this tutorial, we will first create a sample list. You can run the code below.
my_list = ["bicycle", "car", "metro", "plane", "bus"] print(my_list) # ["bicycle", "car", # "metro", "plane", "bus"]
The previous output prints my_list, which contains five strings. Every string in the list contains vowels, let’s see how to count these vowels!
Example 1: Count Number of Vowels in List Using List Comprehension & len() Function
In this example, we will explain how to use the list comprehension method to count the total number of vowels in a list.
This method iterates through the elements of the list and keeps those strings that are identified as vowels using the if statement i.lower() in 'aeiou'
. Then, the len() function gives us the count of total vowels in my_list.
count_vowels = len([i for x in my_list for i in x if i.lower() in 'aeiou']) print(count_vowels) # 8
In the output above we can see that the len() function counts eight vowels in my_list.
Example 2: Count Number of Vowels in List Using User-defined Function
This example shows how to create a user-defined function to count the number of vowels in a list.
As shown in the code below, the user-defined count_vowels() function will iterate through every word in our list and count each time a vowel is found by using the conditional statement if i.lower() in vowels
. The total count of vowels will be stored in the vowel_count variable.
def count_vowels(sample_list): vowels = ('aeiou') vowel_count = 0 for word in sample_list: for i in word: if i.lower() in vowels: vowel_count += 1 return vowel_count
Next, we can apply the count_vowels function to my_list to get the total number of vowels.
count_vowels(my_list) # 8
The result is eight vowels, just as expected!
Example 3: Count Number of Vowels in List Using filter(), sum() & len() Functions
It is also possible to count the vowels in a list by using the filter(), sum() and len() functions. Let’s take look at the code below!
vowels = ('aeiou') count_vowels = sum(len(list(filter(lambda i: i.lower() in vowels, word))) for word in my_list) print(count_vowels) # 8
As you can see on the previously shown output of the Python console, this method uses the filter() function to create a list of vowels for each word in the list.
The lambda function checks if a character is a vowel and the len() function gets the length of the filtered list of vowels, which is added to the total count_vowels using the sum() function. The final result is eight, great!
Video, Further Resources & Summary
Do you need more explanations on how to count the vowels in a list in Python? Then you should have a look at the following YouTube video of the Statistics Globe YouTube channel.
The YouTube video will be added soon.
In addition, you may want to have a look at the related programming tutorials on Statistics Globe:
- Access List Element by Index in Python
- Count Elements Using List Comprehension in Python
- Convert List from Character String to Integer in Python
- Count True & False in List in Python
- Learn Python
This post has shown how to count vowels in a list in Python. In case you have further questions, feel free to leave a comment below.
This page was created in collaboration with Paula Villasante Soriano. Please have a look at Paula’s author page to get more information about her academic background and the other articles she has written for Statistics Globe.
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