What function would you use to find the number of occurrences of a specific character in a string?

• A. index()
• B. count()
• C. find()
• D. length()

Answer: (B)

To determine the number of occurrences of a specific character in a string, the count function is the appropriate choice. This function scans through the string and counts how many times the specified character appears. For example, using "hello".count('l') would return 2, since the character 'l' appears twice in the word "hello".

The other functions do not serve this purpose. The index function is used to find the first occurrence of a specified substring and returns its position rather than counting occurrences. The find function similarly returns the index of the first occurrence of a substring, and if the substring is not found, it returns -1. Lastly, the length function, which isn’t applicable here, is used to determine the total number of characters in a string, not to count specific characters. Thus, the count function is uniquely suited for counting occurrences of a specific character within a string.