Searching and counting elements in Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Counting Specific Items in a Fruit Basket

📖 Scenario: Imagine you have a basket full of different fruits. You want to find out how many apples are in the basket.

🎯 Goal: You will write a program that counts how many times the fruit 'apple' appears in a list of fruits.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list called fruits with specific fruit names

Create a variable called target_fruit to hold the fruit name to count

Use a for loop to count how many times target_fruit appears in fruits

Print the count with a clear message

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Counting specific items in a list is useful in many real-life situations, like counting votes, inventory items, or survey answers.

💼 Career

This skill helps in data analysis, quality control, and any job that requires summarizing or searching through data.

1

Create the fruit list

Create a list called fruits with these exact items in order: 'apple', 'banana', 'apple', 'orange', 'apple', 'banana'

Python

# Create the list called fruits with the exact items
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets [] to create a list and separate items with commas.

2

Set the fruit to count

Create a variable called target_fruit and set it to the string 'apple'

Python

fruits = ['apple', 'banana', 'apple', 'orange', 'apple', 'banana']
# Create the variable target_fruit and set it to 'apple'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an equals sign = to assign the string 'apple' to target_fruit.

3

Count how many times the target fruit appears

Create a variable called count and set it to 0. Then use a for loop with the variable fruit to go through each item in fruits. Inside the loop, if fruit is equal to target_fruit, add 1 to count.

Python

fruits = ['apple', 'banana', 'apple', 'orange', 'apple', 'banana']
target_fruit = 'apple'
# Create count = 0
# Use for fruit in fruits:
#   if fruit == target_fruit:
#     count += 1
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to start count at zero before the loop. Use for fruit in fruits: to check each fruit.

4

Print the count result

Write a print statement to display: "Number of apples: " followed by the value of count using an f-string.

Python

fruits = ['apple', 'banana', 'apple', 'orange', 'apple', 'banana']
target_fruit = 'apple'
count = 0
for fruit in fruits:
    if fruit == target_fruit:
        count += 1
# Print the number of apples using an f-string
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(f"Number of apples: {count}") to show the result clearly.