Why is this code output 6 instead of 5

Question

x="12345"
y=x.count("")
print(y)

Answer 1

That’s how count works in Python, your counting how many times a substring is present in a string.

Your substring is empty, so if you look at your string:

“12345” - there are six occurences of “”, I’ll illustrate with a *:
“*1*2*3*4*5*” - six “” in your string.

Hopefully that makes sense?

Count works slightly different on lists, where it checks the number of times the substring (element) appears in the list.

x=["123", "", "45"]
y=x.count("")
print(y)

As an example will produce 1.

As you tagged length, if you are looking for the string length then use len(str) instead:
y = len(x) 👍