The specific problem is that you check whether bchars[i]
is in d[j]
, but then the key you actually use is chr(i+97)
.
chr(i+97)
is the index of the i
th character in bchars
, but mapped to ASCII characters starting from 'a'
. Why would you want to use this as your key?
I think you really want to do:
for i in range(len(bchars)):
for j in range(len(d)):
if(bchars[i] in d[j]):
d[j][bchars[i]] += 1
else:
d[j][bchars[i]] = 1
Note that you can't use +=
in the else
; remember how you literally just checked whether the key was there and decided it wasn't?
More broadly, though, your code doesn't make sense - it is overcomplicated and does not use the real power of Python's dictionaries. d
looks like:
{0: {'a': 0}, 1: {'b': 0}, 2: {'c': 0}, ...}
It would be much more sensible to build a dictionary mapping character directly to count:
{'a': 0, 'b': 0, 'c': 0, ...}
then you can simply do:
for char in bchars:
if char in d:
d[char] += 1
Python even comes with a class just for doing this sort of thing.